Appreciating the true condition of the patient does not consist merely in finding out the seat, the nature, and the amount of the disease. This is exceedingly important, it is true. But it is by no means all of the case. Sometimes it is but a very partial view of it. For example, suppose that the patient has an inflammation of some organ, and to make the case stronger, let it be a _chronic_ inflammation. In chronic diseases, as you have seen, there are extensive results from sympathy and from the action of concurrent causes in different parts of the system. The physician, in investigating such a case, in order to proportion his curative measures with any accuracy to the ends to be accomplished, must look beyond the main disease, and take into view the whole case, the state of the different organs, and the state of the system as a congeries of organs. A disregard of this important point is very common, and leads to many errors in practice. Let us look at a few of them. Many physicians are disposed to consider the morbid state of the system in almost every case as arising from disease in some particular organ. They therefore, in examining the symptoms, search for this disease; and when they think that they have found it, they refer to this, either directly or indirectly, all the phenomena which the case presents. In their treatment of the case, therefore, they direct their remedial means principally to the local disease. They lose sight of the fact, that often there are several organs simultaneously affected, and that the organ which seems to be most diseased is sometimes found to be less so than some other organ, which exhibited no marked signs of its morbid state. They forget too another important fact—that the disease of an organ is often a mere result of a general bad condition of the system. If in such a case the physician considers the local disease the main thing to be attacked by remedies, and directs his efforts to that point, he commits a great error. And this is an error which occurs, I have no doubt, very often in regard to the most common of all chronic complaints—consumption. The local disease is a result, and not a cause, much more often than is generally supposed, even by physicians. Some physicians acquire exclusive and narrow notions of disease, by having their attention particularly directed to the diseases of certain organs. They get a sort of attachment to some localities in the system, and are disposed always to look to their favorite quarters in their search after the seats of disease. With such an inclination it is no wonder that they often suppose an organ to be the seat of fixed disease, which is merely sympathetically affected.