On one point, however, all agreed: that my patient was a dead man.

Finally they compromised and decided that the poor wretch's torture should be needlessly prolonged by a course of moxas.

I timidly remarked that it would be simpler to send for a confessor, and then assuage the sufferings of the dying man with repeated injections of morphine.

If you had seen their faces! They came as near as anything to denouncing me as a tout for the priests.
"And such is contemporary science.

Everybody discovers a new or forgotten disease, and trumpets a forgotten or a new remedy, and nobody knows a thing! And then, too, what good does it do one not to be hopelessly ignorant since there is so much sophistication going on in pharmacy that no physician can be sure of having his prescriptions filled to the letter?
One example among many: at present, sirup of white poppy, the diacodia of the old Codex, does not exist.