DISEASE HAS CERTAIN UNMISTAKABLE SIGNS,
or symptoms, and, by reason of this fact, we have been enabled to originate and perfect a system of determining with the greatest accuracy the nature of chronic diseases without seeing and personally examining our patients. In recognizing diseases without a personal examination of the patient, we claim to possess no miraculous powers. We obtain our knowledge of the patient's disease by the practical application of well-established principles of modern science to the practice of medicine. And it is to the accuracy with which this system has endowed us that we owe our almost world-wide reputation for the skillful treatment of all lingering, or chronic, affections. This system of practice, with the marvelous success which has been attained through it, demonstrates the fact that diseases display certain phenomena, which, being subjected to scientific analysis, furnish abundant and unmistakable data to guide the judgment of the skillful practitioner aright in determining the nature of diseased conditions.
So successful has been this method of treating patients at a distance that there is scarcely a city or a village in the United States that is not represented by one or more cases upon the "Records of Practice" at the Invalids' Hotel and Surgical Institute. In all chronic diseases that are curable by medical treatment, it is only in very rare cases that we cannot do as well for the patient while he or she remains at home, as if here in person to be examined. But we annually treat hundreds of cases requiring surgical operations and careful after-treatment, and in these cases our Invalids' Hotel, or home, is indispensable. Here the patient has the services not only of the most skillful surgeons, but also, what is quite as necessary in the after treatment, of thoroughly trained and skilled nurses.
What should be the essential characteristics of an Invalids' Home?