“minute crepitations,” “vesicular murmurs,” “obscured resonance,” and if you watch the progress of the disease you may get “tubular breathing,” “bronchophony” “increased vocal vibration,” and no end of good things. Tom Smith remains in the hospital six weeks before he is “discharged cured.” He has suffered many things at the hands of his physicians; he has cost St. Bernard’s say about a pound a week, besides his medical attendance. Who says he has gone out without paying his bill? It has occurred to no one concerned, least of all to the patient, that there is anything wrong in all this treatment. In their passionate eagerness to acquire information that can only be obtained at the bedside, the assiduous students are of course delighted to have Mr. Smith amongst them. The house physician is soon going into private practice, and he wants to consolidate and confirm all his knowledge of the various forms of disease; the lecturer loves nothing better than to exhibit his really admirable powers of clinical observation to a body of rising men, who can send him many patients and more guineas. The patient is usually delighted that so much interest is taken in his case, and contrasts the hurried “Put out your tongue; give me your hand; take this medicine, and I will see you again in two or three days;” all in a hop, skip, and jump style, of the club doctor, with this elaborate marshalling of great medical forces for the purposes of his cure, sadly to the discredit of the club doctor’s hasty method. Nobody sees through it all;—yes, the sisters and the nurses do. The former do their very utmost to soften by their kind assiduity evils which they think are inseparable from the work of a public hospital. The nurses do what they have to do; it is their business to execute orders, and they usually say little, whatever they may think. Then says the reader, “Who is aggrieved? What is there wrong in the system?” What is wrong? Everything! From the long waiting in the out-patients’ ward; the exposure of such a case while the preliminary examination is made; to the long and dangerous examinations of the stripped sufferer in the ward upstairs: with their constant repetition by so many persons; so that it is probable he would have made a better and speedier recovery under the care of the club doctor, who seemed hasty because full of business, but who thoroughly knew what he was about, and only did not waste time over matters his quick eye took in at a glance, and whose large experience was an additional sense. All that auscultation had nothing to do with the man’s cure, but a great deal to do with the education of those concerned in it; and as the treatment consisted in salines, tonics, poultices and rest, with suitable food at suitable times combined with good ventilation and cleanliness, the elaborate exhibition of therapeutic force was very much like cracking a nut with a Nasmyth hammer, only the cracking of the nut was but a detail!