A final result of the multiplication of the means of research, and the increasing difficulty in becoming expert in the use of the many and delicate instruments they require, is the growth of what we call specialties in medicine. The best of us learn to use the ophthalmoscope to look into the eye, to use the laryngoscope for the larynx, and can at need examine the urine and the blood, but the men must be rare who are as competent to use each and all of these means as persons who devote themselves to single branches of our work. Moreover, the element of time comes in, as well as the element of such constant familiar practice as makes for one man commonplace and easy what for another, who is more generally occupied, is uncommon and unfamiliar. The specialist profits by the fact that his experience becomes enormous and his work advantaged by its definite limitations. On the other hand, and nowadays especially, he is too apt to be one who, after brief hospital work of general character, or without this, takes up, as we say, the eye, ear, throat, or uterine organs. Unless he has had at some time a larger and more varied experience, or unless he is a most unusual man, he is prone at last to lose sight in his practice of the fact that eye, ear, and womb are parts of a complicated mechanism, and suffer through its general or local disorders. Hence the too common neglect of constitutional conditions, to which are often due the apparent maladies of the organs to which he devotes himself. Moreover, in certain of the organs of sense, as the eye, are frequently seen the very first signals of spinal or other maladies, and if, as too often happens, he sees in some such sign or symptom only the evidence of a local trouble, and neglects to look or reason beyond it, he may inflict on his patient the gravest penalties, by depriving him of the chance of early treatment of some serious disease, involving lifelong, or even fatal, consequences. This is a criticism on the man and his training, not on the system of specialties which has become invaluable.
A reasonable desire to seek aid from physicians of usefully limited values is another test of the good family physician. I know of men who are in the habit of saying that they dislike consultations and get little good from them. As compared to those who too commonly subject people to the expense of fresh advisers, they are the more dangerous class. Apt enough in cases of acute disease to bring into the case some one to share responsibilities which seem grave because near at hand, they continue to treat chronic cases they do not understand, because there is no crisis of pain, disability, or danger to bring them to reason.