A few years ago dyspepsia was very fashionable; but now it is so old-fashioned, that we hear but little about it, and no hobby-rider thinks at the present day of setting up any pretensions to great skill in the treatment of this complaint. Diseases of the throat have taken its place in the public mind, and multitudes are running to those, who are reputed to have peculiar skill in clipping off tonsils and palates, and swabbing out windpipes. The new treatment, as it is called, is good practice in some cases; but the almost indiscriminate application which some hobby-doctors make of it is ridiculous and contemptible. The confirmed consumptive, who has his palate clipped, or his throat or windpipe swabbed, and because he fancies that he feels better, revives for a time the delusive hope of recovery, and cheerfully pays the doctor his fee, has a most unjustifiable cheat practised upon him. And such fees! From five to twenty dollars, according to the circumstances of the patient, is asked by some of these doctors for clipping the palate, one of the most trifling operations in surgery.[30] When this fashion shall have passed by, as pass it will, like all other fashions before it, and this hobby shall have ceased to be ridden, how little will be the actual knowledge of diseases of the throat and windpipe, which will be found to be added to the stock of information in the possession of the profession by those, who have now the reputation in the community of being very skilful in the treatment of these complaints! Some, who have had less eclat, and have therefore reaped less pecuniary benefit, will have made the proper discriminations; and to them will the profession be indebted for all that has been really discovered in relation to the nature and treatment of these diseases. A habit of making loose and exaggerated statements has become so common in the medical profession, that it is really no small obstacle in the way of the accumulation of accurate observations in medicine. The credulity of the public tempts to an indulgence in such statements, in the common intercourse of physicians with those who are around them, and to whom they relate their cases, and state the results of their experience. If they yield to the temptation, the habit grows, and it inevitably begets and fosters another habit—that of loose observation. The statements of such physicians are not to be relied upon, even when they appear on the pages of some medical journal. Much of the recorded experience of the profession is undoubtedly from this cause worse than valueless.