It is because the physician must deal with situations involving so many independent variables that clinical medicine has remained an art even today — an art based on wisdom and skill derived from experience as much as on scientific knowledge and reasoning. The skill symbolized by the gold-headed cane was not mere charlatanism. It grew in no small part from the physician's awareness — even though ill defined and often subconscious — of the many factors which play a part in the causation and manifestations of disease. It was the fruit of the Hippocratic flowering. Far from being hypnotized by . . .