The result of the false teaching of the class of books alluded to and of the medical advertising, and of the bleating of the tramping lecturers was that a large part of many communities came to believe that blood-letting was a crime against health, and a hindrance to recovery from disease, no matter what might be the conditions. The average intelligence of even well-educated communities goes no further than to accept the plausible teaching that is every day thrust upon its tympanum; it does not stop to criticise the motives nor to analyze the arguments of the advertiser, nor is it cultured in this direction to the capacity of justly weighing them according to their true significance. The average intelligence of even well-educated communities is not up to that grasp of the science of medicine necessary to determine between false and fallacious teaching and that which is rational and correct; it does not differentiate between clap-trap and honesty; it does not separate humbug from truth, and as an ocean of humbug passes the public gullet easier than an ounce of truth, it is not strange that the condition obtaining about bleeding is not so much that the physician has discarded it as improper, or has lost sight of its value in many cases, as that the community will not tolerate him in the abstraction of blood. Public prejudice overrides professional opinion, unless the opinion runs current with the prejudice. To bleed your patient and then have him die is to be damned; if he dies without being bled, no matter whatever else you may do or leave undone, the chances of being cursed are largely lessened. Besides this, very little or nothing is gained against the prejudice by recovery after bleeding, since the popular opinion will be that the patient would have gotten well quicker and better without it—an opinion that can seldom be disproved. Exactly in the same way in any case where venesection has been practiced and the patient does not get well, the opponents of the operation will assert that the bleeding caused the death, and that, in the absence of it, the patient would have got well; which also is difficult to disprove. The average mind proceeds from supposed causes to effects with most unreasonable logic.