The practice, then, of interfering with physicians in the performance of their duties, which is so common in every community, impairs their usefulness, not only directly, by embarrassing them in their treatment of the sick, but also indirectly, by encouraging the intrigues and manœuvres of the dishonorable in our profession. We have no hope of persuading busy-bodies to abandon a practice of which they are so fond; but we have a right to expect, that the wise and good, who are so often betrayed into it by zeal for some favorite physician, or remedy, or by a generous kindness, or an urgent anxiety for the patient, will, upon seeing their error, renounce it, and pursue in future such a course as will secure to the sick the best efforts of the physician in their behalf. FOOTNOTES: [37] Though the plan of charging so much a visit, so universally adopted by the profession, is on the whole the best general plan of regulating the prices of the physician’s services, it is liable to some abuses. Some variations from it must of course be allowed; and in making these a door is opened for manœuvering on the part of dishonorable practitioners. It is a very common ‘trick of the trade’ to make more visits than are necessary, perhaps quite short ones, and then charge less per visit than is usually charged by medical men in the same neighborhood. In this way the credit of being both a very cheap and a very attentive physician is most unjustly obtained. CHAPTER XIV. THE MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF MIND AND BODY IN DISEASE.[38] Many seem to think that when the body is sick, it is simply a sickness of the body alone, and the mind has nothing to do with it. They do indeed allow that when actual mental derangement occurs in connection with any disease the mind is affected with the body; but they are prone to lose sight of the fact in all ordinary cases of disease, and yet it exists in these as really, though not to the same degree. The influence of disease upon the mind is obvious to the most careless and superficial observer, when he sees the delirium produced by inflammation of the brain; but such cases seem to him to stand out as glaring exceptions to what he considers the great general fact—that the mind is independent of the ailments of the body. Physicians themselves too often overlook the influence of mind in their treatment of disease, and the community generally have very inadequate views of its extent and universality. There can not be any sickness of the body, however slight, that does not produce some effect upon the mind, and which is not influenced either for good or for ill through mental impressions.