Let us first look at the _trials_ of a medical life. The physician is subjected to great fatigue both of body and mind. He has no time that he can call his own. That regularity of life, which is so essential to comfort as well as to health, he must in a great measure abandon, especially if he practice in a scattered population. While most men have their stated seasons of repose, he is liable to be called for at any hour, and often night after night sleep is a stranger to his eyelids. His duties to his patients are often of such immediate importance, that no stress of weather, however violent, is considered as an excuse for delay. When prevailing disease spreads terror through the community he must be at his post, and expose himself to the pestilence under the influence of powerful predisposing causes—anxiety and fatigue. And then there are at all times anxieties and perplexities, producing a wear and tear of mind, which is worse than all the bodily fatigue that he is called to endure. It is not surprising then, that it has been satisfactorily ascertained by statistics, that physicians constitute one of the short-lived classes of the community. And for all this generally the medical man gets comparatively a small compensation. Though some physicians acquire wealth, especially in our large cities, still as a body of men they are in moderate circumstances, and the practice of medicine may be truly said to be far from being a money-making business. A large proportion of those whom they serve are too poor to give them any compensation, and very many of those who are able to pay them do not without reluctance and delay. This, it is true, is in part to be attributed to the remissness of physicians in presenting their claims. But why this remissness? If I mistake not, it arises from the unwillingness to pay, which they so often meet with, even in quarters where they have no reason to expect it. The consequent dislike to the business of collecting begets a habit of neglecting it. A large proportion of their patients feel a less urgent obligation to pay them, than they do to pay others. I know not any other reason for this than the _intangibility_ of the favor which is bestowed by the physician. If a man buy a coat of the tailor, or a barrel of flour of the grocer, he has a _tangible_ memento of his obligation; for the coat is seen, and is felt upon his back, and the flour is eaten, and makes its _sensible_ impression on the palate and stomach. But health restored is a thing of air, and the visits of the physician, as they have left no memorial behind them that addresses the _senses_, are easily forgotten. For the same reason a man will not so easily forget his obligations to his physician if he has amputated a limb for him, as he would if he had attended him through a course of fever. His crutch or his wooden leg, is ever present to remind him of them. And for the same reason also, as the tailor and grocer can get their pay more