"Gentlemen," said the lecturer--a well-known provincial consultant, "I should like the day to dawn when I could be met at the door of my hospital by a trained chemist, a trained bacteriologist, a trained pathologist, so that when I came to some complicated case I could say, 'Chemist, a part of this problem is yours, take it and work it out. Bacteriologist, perform your share in elucidating this difficulty. Pathologist, advance, and do likewise.'" There was a little applause; and after all, he had got, I suppose, some glimmering of what the new medicine is to be. Only he, the lecturer, was still, do you see, to be the _deus ex machina_. He was a genial old gentleman and quite without conceit, and was merely taking, as we all do, I'm afraid, the predominant position of the consulting physician as fixed for eternity. Whereas instead it is quite healthily rocking, I fancy, on waters that are ceasing to be stagnant. Yours ever, P. H. XIX _To Hugh Pontrex, Hotel Montana, Biarritz._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _July_ 16, 1910. MY DEAR HUGH, So the pendulum of our frailty swings. The warm airs of July have surrounded you with well-being in your Atlantic quarters, and a confounded carbuncle under my left shoulder has been painting my world quite black for at least four days, and grey for the inside of a week. It's the penalty, I suppose, of being rarely laid aside by sickness, that when some trivial misfortune does make its appearance, one exaggerates its proportion in the general scheme of things to a quite unmerited degree--and especially, I think, if one happens to be a doctor. "Physician, heal thyself," the mockers say. But he should never attempt to. He knows too much about the various possibilities, the remoter significances of each one of his little troubles, to be a sufficiently clear-minded judge. And he is far better advised when he resigns his body _in toto_ to the care of some outside mind, and confines his own mental powers to the fortification of his private philosophy. Pain, sleeplessness, and that peculiar sense of being disowned by one's own body that a high temperature always seems to induce--I suppose if all the comfortable words that have been uttered in their explanation were to be gathered up into a book the whole world would not be great enough to contain it. We were told not so desperately long ago that they represented the direct tenancy of the evil one or some of his dependents. Then a more enlightened but still stern theology informed us that they represented the well-deserved judgments of God; until a later and more generous interpretation has inclined rather to believe in them as evidences, a little puzzlingly disguised, of a chastening yet still indubitable Love.