"Of course they do," sneered the doctor; "but then Nature does it for them. Nature works wonders in many cases."
"But what does that signify if the patient recovers?"
"Yes, sir, it does matter. If you don't help Nature, it will over-exert itself, and do more harm than good."
"But when your patients get well, who knows whether Nature or you did it?"
"We, sir; we do; we who have been at the university for not less than five years, where our professors have told us that a patient will not recover unless we give him certain medicines. Those ignoramuses who know nothing of science, those homœopathists who know neither chemistry nor mineralogy, nor anthropophagy—anthropology I meant to say, they are always at their old tricks. Whenever we make a brilliant cure, they say that Nature has done it. But we know better! Why, on my word and honour, of what use would our studies at Pesth have been, if we did not know so much as that?"
"Certainly!" said Akosh. "What's the use of learning so many things if you know no more than anybody else?"
"True, sir; and catch a homœopathist with a bad case!" cried Sherer. "What does he do? He calls in an allopathist, as happened in the case of the old advocate at Dustbury."
"He died three days after he had fallen into the hands of the county physician," said Kalman. "I talked to the doctor who treated him first, and he told me that, seeing that the case was hopeless, and that the poor man's sufferings were great, he called in the county physician to finish him. The doctors of your class despatch people so quickly, you know."
This attack proved too strong for the surgeon's temper. He was convinced of the usefulness of his science, for that science gave him, as district surgeon, an annual income of three hundred florins, with the use of a house, not to mention fees, which were considerable. What Kalman said was to him worse than blasphemy; and unbounded were the disgust and scorn expressed in all his features, when he saw Janosh, radiant with joy, notifying his unqualified assent to, and approbation of, the jokes of young Kishlaki.
"Now is there a single grain of sense in all the doings of the homœopathists?" said he at length. "Suppose a man is ill. Suppose he has eaten a large quantity of Tarhonya, and he can't digest it. Now what does a homœopathist give him? On my honour and conscience, what else but the millionth part of a drop of camomile oil? Now all I want to know is, how you make it out? A large dish of Tarhonya and——"