“You see, sir,” Westerling went on, smiling with a new satisfaction that showed how exclusively his satisfaction dwelt in knowledge, in discussion, in release from the naked domain of emotion, “you see, when I graduated from Medical School eight years ago, and from the hospitals here and abroad, a strange revelation had come to me. I had lost faith absolutely in the practice of medicine.” Mr. Daindrie was a good listener; a stern one. He bowed his head judicially. Westerling talked exclusively to him. But loudly. So that his consciousness of other ears must have gone to the volume of his voice. Perhaps, it occurred to David, he was trying within this little cozy table to address the world. “It was a problem to face, let me assure you. Like one who graduates into the Priesthood, perhaps, and finds he no longer believes in the Divinity of Christ. Harder, much harder, I suppose--since in medicine the régime of study is terrific.” He said these words coldly. He seemed to avoid a tone which might bring sympathy, conviction. He had no eye for the faint shadow over Mrs. Daindrie’s face, at his allusion to Christ. “But how do you mean, you lost faith?” asked Mr. Daindrie. “I had believed myself devoted to a science. I found that the present practice of medicine--the practice of medicine as it must be to-day in _lack_ of science--is an empiric fraternal order.” Mrs. Daindrie gasped. “I am convinced that most of the therapeutic practices which occupy so overwhelming a part of the work of the doctor must go. No; I don’t know to be replaced by what. But the principle of introducing specific drugs into the system to right specific maladies, right wrongs--I know it is false. Some day most of our medical practice will be regarded as medieval, quite as we look on the humors and the cuppings of the Sixteenth Century leeches.” “But there is nothing known to take the place of these medicines?” “Nothing established.” “Then, until such time, must we not use what we have?” “Doubtless we must, sir,” Westerling spoke with a certain condescension. “But I cannot devote my life to the application of guess work and patch work which, I am convinced, is altogether based on erroneous premises.” “As sweeping as that ...?” Superlatives, absolutes, all tendencies toward violence brought out in Mr. Daindrie the deprecatory smile. “Yes. The sole sound future of Medicine must rest on the discovery of principles beneath effects which we call physical and mental life; principles the pursuit of which will make the introduction of alien curative elements into our bodies simply absurd. I am referring not only to medicines but to vaccines, anti-toxins--surgical makeshifts. The true curative elements of life must be inherent in us. Somehow we have lost them. I am convinced the reason is that we have lost certain unconscious principles of behavior in which they are implicit. I am convinced that drugs are superstition.”