If, on the other hand, the type be the educated merchant or the gentleman, the inferior and uneducated practitioner may just as well take the brass plate from his door, for disappointment only awaits him.

We will next depict that very frequent medical event, the sale and transfer of a practice, and we shall do this while describing THE YOUNG DOCTOR WHO PURCHASES A PRACTICE.

He is usually introduced by what is called nominal partnership—a practical deception, which varies in duration from six months to three years-rarely longer than this. In the sale of a practice, the chief considerations are the sum of money required, and the ability to pay it; the qualification to succeed to the practice is not even entertained, except in advertisements, which occasionally announce that the applicant must be a married man.

Pecuniary arrangements being adjusted, the patients are duly made over, just as a hatter's stock-blocks and all, would be transferred to another hatter.

It is, in fact, a purely mercantile affair, from the beginning to the end; and were it represented as such, there would be no great harm in it: but the medical vender tells his confiding patients that he has met with an extraordinarily

talented young man, who is far superior to all the other practitioners in the town or village put together that he has taken him as a partner on account of declining health—or being overworked, or some other excuse -and in this way nine-tenths of a practice are transferred to any thing or any one who can find the cash. But is it right thus to transfer patients who have honoured you with their confidence, without previously ascertaining that the gentleman whom you recommend is in every way worthy to be made the depositary of so much flattering confidence and trust?

Is there not something very reprehensible in this wholesale system of trafficking in human life? this transferring of respectable families from the experienced, tried, and practised man, to the theoretical, untried youth? Does no responsibility attach to any of the parties acting in this farce? Does the father of a family imagine that he can honestly confide the lives of wife and children to the care of a man who knows nothing of their previous history, peculiarities, and susceptibilities, or what the public call their constitution? Assuredly he cannot, or why should families attach so much importance to their old and valued doctors? Even with a man of vast experience, much caution and discretion are re

quired on first prescribing for a case of illness. Many people have the strangest and most unaccountable peculiarities of constitution. I know a gentleman who is invariably poisoned if he take the slightest particle of egg. It will induce the most alarming symptoms. In fact, his life has many times been nearly forfeited through partaking of articles of food not usually containing egg. I have seen a case in which the minutest dose of mercury in any shape would salivate in four-and-twenty hours. But instances could be multiplied, almost to infinity, of constitutional peculiarities; and yet young men, who have seen little or no practice, will boldly undertake to tend the lives of numerous families, comprising every age and every peculiarity of frame and constitution.

Is this right? Can it be right, suddenly to undertake duties which have grown up around a predecessor during many years, at the cost of much anxiety and thought?

It resembles an inexperienced youth taking a farm to reap its harvest, without knowing anything of the nature of its soil, its drainage or its capabilities,-without even knowing the nature of its crops, or how they found their way into the earth. He gathers the first crop well, because it was the growth of others' labour and

experience; but when he comes to till the land. himself, he finds that its soil will not produce the same results. One field requires one kind of treatment, and another requires another kind of treatment, and time, and labour, and anxiety, are liberally laid out to gain the necessary knowledge; but during the earlier years, while experimentalising, his crops will droop and die, and his pocket has to pay for all this hardearned experience.

Would that it were the same with physic, when unskilful men take practices they are not competent to manage; but, unfortunately, when the crops of human life sicken it is the doctor's gain. The contract for doctoring the poor of a parish was formerly-and is now, occasionallycalled farming it, and it is a very applicable term in all but its pecuniary bearings.

However, private families have, I presume, a perfect right to do as they like with their own, or they would not do it. But can we accord the same privilege to those who have public appointments at their disposal, such as a union, a life club, a provident society, a dispensary, or a hospital? I think not. I think that in all public appointments the best man should be electedit should not be a matter of " favour or affection," but of contested, earned, and well-merited right.

In France, if a vacancy occur in a hospital the most distinguished men enter the lists, and undergo a searching examination, and the best wins, and not the richest or the most aristocratic. Is it not hard, nay cruel, that the poor, the inoffensive, and the helpless sufferer, should be compelled to have an inexperienced man, or, as is usually the case, his unqualified assistant, simply because he purchased the succession to a practice? Such appointments are in principle the most oppressive, the most unfeeling, and the most offensive to our sense of justice and humanity, of anything connected with the medical calling. Is not life as dear? are not the affections as strong the sympathies as acute-the attachments between husband and wife-parent and child—as enduring among the poor as the rich? Why, in the name of common charity, should their claims to our consideration in the selection of a surgeon be wholly set at naught? It is a censure on humanity to elect a man simply because he is rich enough to purchase another's practice. What have the poor to do with the friendship subsisting between doctor and poorlaw guardian-or charity treasurer or other jack-in-office? Such men know about as much of a doctor's qualifications as they do of the "Wandering Jew" or the "Man in the Moon."