Wonderful and miraculous cures are performed at these shrines, and some of the cures are of a nature that would baffle the intelligence of the most learned mind to ascertain the intricate and devious way that nature must at times journey to accomplish some of these changes. The writer well remembers seeing, in the Church of Corpus Christi, in Turin,[27] a long hall, covered, from marble pavement to ceiling, with votive tablets, after the manner inaugurated in the old temples of Greece. Modern votaries have the advantage of being able to record their cure, safe venture or escape from peril, by means of faithful representation of the event in painting or drawing, as the material and art is more common now than in the days of ancient Greece, who recorded its cures by simple inscription in laconic terms. Modern medicine labors under the disadvantage of presuming that the people are endowed with an intelligence that was unknown to ancient or mediæval people, when, in fact, the people are as credulous and as subject to imposition as they were in the earlier centuries of the present era. With all its supposed superior intelligence, there is no fatter pasture for quacks and impostors than that presented by the people of the United States. Whenever I see the poor, intelligent, broad-minded physician struggling along, barely able to procure for himself the necessaries required to maintain himself with proper books and appliances, while the itinerant quack or dogmatic practitioner rolls in undeserved affluence, I question the wisdom of our ethical code. Braddock, at the Monongahela, scorned to have his regulars, who had fought under Marlborough and Eugene, break ranks before a lot of breech-clouted savages, and take shelter that the nature of the ground and the trees could afford, thinking it an unfit action for men who had faced the veterans of Louis XIV on many a hard-fought European field. I sometimes think that if _our_ regulars were, for only a season, to follow the example of the provincial militia at that battle, it would be better for the country, the people, science, and last, but not the least, for the profession. The theory that we should not counsel with quacks is altogether mischievous and fallacious, although right and rigidly orthodox in its intent; were we to counsel and meet these gentry, we should expose their ignorance and assumption, and we should not be exposed to the charge of jealousy and of fear to meet them in consultation. I remember on one occasion a client went to a lawyer for advice as to how he might dispossess some parties who had some adverse claim to some property which he owned, after due deliberation and a protracted siege of the house, in the vain hope of gaining admittance; the lawyer advised his client to go and nail up all exits and fasten them in, which had the effect of driving them out. So with our profession--we should not neglect an opportunity of meeting a quack in consultation, regardless of the nature of the case; it is the only way to nail them up; as it is, we have simply chained up the shepherd-dog and given the wolves full play.