Many chronic cases become exceedingly complex, and therefore obstinate, from the course which the patient takes with himself, before he comes under regular and systematic treatment. Perhaps, first, he goes through with domestic medication, and then takes patent medicines, recommended to him by kind neighbors, or blazoned forth in the newspapers. Then he tries some vaunted system—Thompsonism, or hydropathy, or homœopathy, or chrono-thermalism, or perhaps all of them in succession. After going through all this, unless some one of these measures _chance_ to benefit his case, (as _anything_ may _chance_ to do it), he at last comes to a physician, and puts himself under his care. The case which was, perhaps, sufficiently complicated in the beginning to require strict investigation, is now rendered, by all this variety of practice, very intricate. The difficulty in understanding it lies in the varied effects which the different agents brought to bear on it have produced—effects, which, in the retrospect, it is almost impossible to estimate with any correctness, because the physician has only the history given him by the patient, and the appearance of his present symptoms, to guide him in making up his opinions. If he had himself seen the case in its untouched condition, and then had witnessed the operation of the different remedies, he would have been better able to arrive at satisfactory conclusions. A chronic case, in its best estate, needs to be watched for some little time, in order to acquire a just and thorough knowledge of its character. And when it has gone through a series of processes at _haphazard_, with no intelligent eye to observe it, it is no wonder that its condition should become a complicated and puzzling one. The physician, with such a case before him, is situated very much as the chemist would be, into whose hands should be put a mixture which had been experimented upon over and over again by different chemists, and those, too, who were ignorant and bungling. And as you would not demand of him, that he should arrive at once at definite results in examining the composition of such a mixture, but would give him time to apply various tests to it, so it should not be expected of the physician that he should fully understand at once a case which has been dabbled with by ignorant experimenters, one after another; but time must be given him to watch _his_ tests, that he may see them bring out to view its real character and condition.