It has been argued that the capable physician need not fear the incompetent pretender, for, like dregs, he must "settle to the bottom" and find his place. This might be true if the people had correct notions of the true theory of therapeutics. As it is, the scholarly, competent physician knows (and intelligent laymen often know) that the pretenders too often are the fellows who get the reputations of being the "big doctors." Why? I think mainly because, being ignorant, they practice largely as quacks, and by curing (?) all kinds of dangerous (on their own diagnosis) diseases quickly, "breaking up" this and "aborting" that unbreakable and unabortable disease (by "hot air" treatment mainly), they place the whole system upon such a basis of quackery that the deluded masses often pronounce the best equipped and most conscientious physician a "poor doctor," because he will not pretend to do all that the wind-jamming grafter claims _he has_ done and _can_ do. Here is a case in point which I know to be true. The farce began some years ago in a small college in Oregon. A big, awkward, harmless-looking fellow came to the college one fall and entered the preparatory department. At the end of the year, after he had failed in every examination and shown conclusively that he had no capacity to learn anything, he was told that it was a waste of time for him to go to school, and they could not admit him for another year. Was he squelched? Not he. The fires of ambition yet burned in his breast, and the next year he turned up at a medical college. I presume it had the same high educational requirements for admission that some other medical colleges have, and enforced them in about the same way. At any rate he met the requirements ($$$), and pursued his medical researches with bright visions of being a doctor to lure him on. But his inability to learn anything manifested itself again, and, presumably, his money gave out. At any rate he was sent away without a diploma. Still the fire of ambition was not extinguished in his manly bosom. Regulations were not strict in those days, so he went to a small town, wore fine clothes, a silk hat and a pompous air, and--within a short time was being called for forty miles around to "counsel little doctors" in their desperate cases. Such cases are all too common, as honest physicians know.