aggregate influence (as it may be called) of his daily life in the many homes to which his profession gives him admittance, that imparts force to his advice, and opinions, and acts. I have as yet said nothing especially of the influence of the physician in the _sick room_. Here he treads upon sacred ground, and has to do with the issues of life and death, both temporal and eternal. Here he sees man in the weakness of his humanity, ‘crushed before the moth,’ but often, too, in the strength of his immortality. Here he is made a witness of the frailty of the tenement, which the immortal spirit inhabits—he sees that its ‘foundation is in the dust.’ He has communion with the spirit in its most momentous hours—while it sees the walls of its habitation crumbling into dust, and lingers about the ruins before its final flight into a world of light or darkness, of joy or of woe—or perhaps, while with longing desire, and occasional hope of its longer continuance here, it trembles with the fear that it is about to be driven from its home in this tabernacle, whose frailty is now staring it in the face—and then too, there are times when he has converse with it as it is becoming reinstated in the possession of its habitation by gracious permission of its builder, who alone can repair it and redeem it from destruction. Communion with the spirit of man in such momentous seasons, how hallowed should it be! Trifling, selfishness, disregard of principle, how out of place are they here! It is not my design to enter fully into a discussion of the moral and religious duties, which devolve upon the physician in the sick room. I choose rather to refer the reader for instruction on these points to the excellent letters of Dr. Burder, an English physician, which I have introduced in the Appendix. I shall therefore only notice some of the errors which are prevalent on this subject.