For a monthly journal, costing 4s., to reach its 1,000th
number with every sign of sustained, if not increasing, virility, as the Practitioner has just done, is eminently a matter for congratula- tion, and when the achievement is celebrated by as attractive a convivial gathering as the Practitioner arranged last Monday, appreciation must be added to felicitation. Everyone who mattered in the medical profession was there—including some of the King's doctors, who were eyed with fitting awe and with firmly suppressed desires to ask them pertinent (in one sense) and impertinent (in another sense) questions. The few- laymen included Sir Alan Herbert, whom a marriage or two has some- how linked with the Practitioner, and myself. While Sir Alan was trying to suborn someone to faint in the middle of the floor, to see what the reaction on the medical profession would be, I was endeavouring to construct a synthetic medical physiognomy from the hundreds around me ; the endeavour was not successful. If Sir Heneage Ogilvie, the Editor of the Practitioner, enjoyed his party as much as his guests did, he must have had a foretaste of the bliss of the world to come (which so many of his guests' past patients are already savouring).
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