In order to show the readiness with which the public commit errors, on the points to which I have alluded, in their estimate of comparative success, I will suppose a case which occurs not very unfrequently. Here are two rival physicians side by side. The one is really skillful, and, if the results of his practice could be justly estimated, he would obtain great credit for success. He engages in medicine, not as a mere trade, but as a noble science. He pursues a straightforward, honorable, and quiet course, resorting to no tricks to acquire business. The other, on the contrary, is unskillful, cares little for medicine as a science, depends upon artifice, rather than real merit, to obtain business, and, though he may desire to be successful, he desires more that he may have the reputation of being so. The issue which is made by these two physicians before the public is a false one. Though the unskillful one loses more patients than the other does, in proportion to the whole number who come under his care; yet he perhaps does not lose as many, in proportion to the number of those which are considered bad cases by the community. For he makes many cases to be bad ones which need not to have been so, and, besides this, represents many as being bad, that are really not attended with any danger. Suppose, to make this clear, that, each physician has one hundred cases of some prevailing epidemic—that each has thirty bad cases—that the skillful physician loses five of these, the unskillful one eight, the real balance being therefore much against the latter. But the latter more than compensates for this difference, by making ten bad cases out of comparatively mild ones, of which he loses perhaps but one or two, (such cases having, as I have before shown, a strong tendency to recovery,) and by representing ten others to be bad cases which are not so. How then stands the account? The unskillful physician, has, it is true, lost more patients than the other. But then, he has _appeared_ to have more cases of the epidemic fall into his hands; for, while his rival has had but thirty bad cases, he reckons up fifty of his as having been of this character, and the community know but little of those cases which are acknowledged to be mild ones—these make no noise, and are not commonly taken into the account, in the estimates which the public make on this subject.