But let us look beyond the results which occur during the progress of disease, and examine those which appear after recovery has taken place. When one recovers under injudicious practice, his system is not apt to be in a good state. His convalescence is not a clear one, and his recovery is not full and complete. Perhaps his vital energies are impaired, and his constitution has received unnecessarily an injury, from which it may never wholly recover. Perhaps some local chronic ailment is left behind, which, though it may trouble him but slightly for a long time, may yet be the germ of some future disease. Such a state of things is not inconsistent with a tolerable condition of health, even when there may be such disease, as will gradually accumulate, till it bring him to a bed of sickness, perhaps of death. These remote consequences of bad practice are the more certain to occur, if the patient go on, after recovery, to administer medicines to himself according to his own whims, or those of others. Many very tedious cases of this kind fall at length under the care of physicians, from the hands of quacks, who are thus often spared from witnessing the results of their ignorance and imposture, and from bearing, in the estimation of the public, any responsibility in relation to them. The influence of bad practice upon the health of families, it is evident from the above facts, must be very great; and yet it is seldom appreciated at all, and never as fully as it should be. There is no question of the fact that there is generally a much larger amount of sickness, from year to year, in families that employ unskilful physicians or empirics, than there is in those who are under the care of skilful practitioners. And though the public cannot discriminate accurately between individual cases in regard to this point, they can see the evidence of this general fact, especially in comparing good practice with gross quackery. This evidence will go on to increase, inasmuch as the evil effects of quackery, continued in a family from year to year, are constantly accumulating; a result which is materially aided by the unnecessary dosing, commonly pursued by them in the intervals of sickness. And from this accumulation we may infer, that what we now see of the bad consequences of quackery is but a shadow of what we may see hereafter. Let us now sum up the points in which the practice of the really skilful physician differs in its results, from that of the injudicious practitioner, and the quack. 1. He has a less number of fatal cases in proportion to the whole number that come under treatment. 2. He has a less number of bad cases, because he avoids converting light cases into grave ones, and succeeds in arresting disease in many cases in its very commencement. 3. His patients have commonly a shorter sickness. 4. They are in a better condition after they have recovered—less apt to have bad results left behind, and less liable to disease in future.