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IN REPLY TO A YOUNG PHYSICIAN*
*Published in part in "Health and the Inner Life," p 81.
Dear Sir: Yours of the 5th is received, and in answer I would say that it is easier to ask a question than to answer it. But I will answer your question partly by asking another, and partly by coming at it by a parable. For to answer any question with regard to my mode of treatment would be like asking a physician how he knows a patient has the typhoid fever by feeling the pulse, and requesting the answer direct so that the person asking the question could sit down and be sure to define the disease from the answer.
My mode of treatment is not decided in that way, and to give a definite answer to your inquiry would be as much out of place as to ask you to tell me all you know about medical practice so that I could put it into practice for the curing of disease, with no further knowledge [apart from what] I might get from you. You see the absurdity of that request.
If it were in my power to give to the world the benefit of twenty years' hard study in one short or long letter, it would have been before the people long before this. The people ask they know not what. You might as well ask a man to tell you how to talk Greek without studying it, as to ask me to tell you how I test the true pathology of disease, or how I test the true diagnosis of disease, etc. All of these questions would be very easily answered if I assumed a standard, and then tested all disease by that standard.
The old mode of determining the diagnosis of disease is made up of opinions of diseased persons, in their right mind and out of it, all mixed up together, and set down accompanied by a certain state of pulse. In this dark chaos of error [the doctors] come to certain results like this: If you see a man going towards the water, he is going in swimming; for people go in swimming. But if he is running with his hat and coat off, he is either going to drown himself, or someone is drowning, and soon. This is the old way. Mine is this.
If I see a man, I know it, and if I feel the cold I know it.· But to see a person going towards the water is no sign that I know what he is going to do. He may be going to bathe, or may be going to drown himself. Now here is the difference between the physician and myself, and this may give you some idea of how I define disease.
