TREATING PATIENTS AT THEIR HOMES,
without requiring them to undergo personal examinations. We reasoned that the physician has abundant opportunity to accurately determine the nature of most chronic diseases without ever seeing the patient. In substantiating that proposition, we cited the perfect accuracy with which scientists are enabled to deduce the most minute particulars in their several departments, which appears almost miraculous, if we view the subject in the light of the early ages. Take, for example, the electro-magnetic telegraph, the greatest invention of the age. Is it not a marvelous degree of accuracy which enables an operator to exactly locate a fracture in a sub-marine cable nearly three thousand miles long? Our venerable "clerk of the weather" has become so thoroughly familiar with the most wayward elements of nature that he can accurately predict their movements. He can sit in Washington and foretell what the weather will be in Florida or New York, as well as if hundreds of miles did not intervene between him and the places named. And so in all departments of modern science, what is required is the knowledge of certain signs. From these, scientists deduce accurate conclusions regardless of distance. A few fossils sent to the expert geologist enables him to accurately determine the rock-formation from which they were taken. He can describe it to you as perfectly as if a cleft of it were lying on his table. So also the chemist can determine the constitution of the sun as accurately as if that luminary were not ninety-five million miles from his laboratory. The sun sends certain signs over the "infinitude of space," which the chemist classifies by passing them through the spectroscope. Only the presence of certain substances could produce these solar signs.
So, also, in medical science,