literature of the profession should be represented upon our shelves.
Much of it is there already, and as one private library after another
falls into this by the natural law of gravitation, it will gradually
acquire all that is most valuable almost without effort. A scholar
should not be in a hurry to part with his books. They are probably
more valuable to him than they can be to any other individual. What
Swedenborg called “correspondence” has established itself between
his intelligence and the volumes which wall him within their sacred
inclosure. Napoleon said that his mind was as if furnished with
drawers,--he drew out each as he wanted its contents, and closed it
at will when done with them. The scholar's mind, to use a similar
comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his library. Each book knows
its place in the brain as well as against the wall or in the alcove. His
consciousness is doubled by the books which encircle him, as the trees
that surround a lake repeat themselves in its unruffled waters. Men talk
of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one who loves his books, and
has lived long with them, has a nervous filament which runs from his
sensorium to every one of them. Or, if I may still let my fancy draw
its pictures, a scholar's library is to him what a temple is to the
worshipper who frequents it. There is the altar sacred to his holiest
experiences. There is the font where his new-born thought was baptized
and first had a name in his consciousness. There is the monumental
tablet of a dead belief, sacred still in the memory of what it was while
yet alive. No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs of the
books that have gathered around the scholar, but for him, from the Aldus
on the lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has
a language which none but he can interpret. Be patient with the
book-collector who loves his companions too well to let them go. Books
are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever
lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his more
liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice. Let
the fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it. Who would have
stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind
no longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and
fondle them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been
to him,--to him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his
playthings?
We need in this country not only the scholar, but the virtuoso, who
hoards the treasures which he loves, it may be chiefly for their rarity
and because others who know more than he does of their value set a high
price upon them. As the wine of old vintages is gently decanted out
of its cobwebbed bottles with their rotten corks into clean new
receptacles, so the wealth of the New World is quietly emptying many
of the libraries and galleries of the Old World into its newly formed
collections and newly raised edifices. And this process must go on in an
accelerating ratio. No Englishman will be offended if I say that before
the New Zealander takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge
to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's in the midst of a vast solitude, the
treasures of the British Museum will have found a new shelter in the
halls of New York or Boston. No Catholic will think hardly of my saying
that before the Coliseum falls, and with it the imperial city, whose
doom prophecy has linked with that of the almost eternal amphitheatre,
the marbles, the bronzes, the paintings, the manuscripts of the Vatican
will have left the shores of the Tiber for those of the Potomac, the
Hudson, the Mississippi, or the Sacramento. And what a delight in the
pursuit of the rarities which the eager book-hunter follows with the
scent of a beagle!
Shall I ever forget that rainy day in Lyons, that dingy bookshop, where
I found the Aetius, long missing from my Artis bledicae Principes, and
where I bought for a small pecuniary consideration, though it was marked
rare, and was really tres rare, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, edited
by and with a preface from the hand of Francis Rabelais? And the
vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice, afterwards my only
reading when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two
hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to
this day still fresh in my memory. And the Schenckius,--the folio filled
with casus rariores, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the
bookstall on the boulevard,--and the noble old Vesalius with its grand
frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pare,
long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius
with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of
fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of
all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
Berengarius Carpensis,--but why multiply names, every one of which
brings back the accession of a book which was an event almost like the
birth of an infant?
A library like ours must exercise the largest hospitality. A great many
books may be found in every large collection which remind us of those
apostolic looking old men who figure on the platform at our political
and other assemblages. Some of them have spoken words of wisdom in their
day, but they have ceased to be oracles; some of them never had any
particularly important message for humanity, but they add dignity to the
meeting by their presence; they look wise, whether they are so or not,
and no one grudges them their places of honor. Venerable figure-heads,
what would our platforms be without you?
Just so with our libraries. Without their rows of folios in creamy
vellum, or showing their black backs with antique lettering of tarnished
gold, our shelves would look as insufficient and unbalanced as a column
without its base, as a statue without its pedestal. And do not think
they are kept only to be spanked and dusted during that dreadful period
when their owner is but too thankful to become an exile and a wanderer
from the scene of single combats between dead authors and living
housemaids. Men were not all cowards before Agamemnon or all fools
before the days of Virchow and Billroth. And apart from any practical
use to be derived from the older medical authors, is there not a true
pleasure in reading the accounts of great discoverers in their own
words? I do not pretend to hoist up the Bibliotheca Anatomica of
Mangetus and spread it on my table every day. I do not get out my great
Albinus before every lecture on the muscles, nor disturb the majestic
repose of Vesalius every time I speak of the bones he has so admirably
described and figured. But it does please me to read the first
descriptions of parts to which the names of their discoverers or those
who have first described them have become so joined that not even modern
science can part them; to listen to the talk of my old volume as Willis
describes his circle and Fallopius his aqueduct and Varolius his bridge
and Eustachius his tube and Monro his foramen,--all so well known to
us in the human body; it does please me to know the very words in which
Winslow described the opening which bears his name, and Glisson his
capsule and De Graaf his vesicle; I am not content until I know in what
language Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation, and how
Spigelius made the liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a
monument more enduring than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and
the kidney.
But after all, the readers who care most for the early records of
medical science and art are the specialists who are dividing up the
practice of medicine and surgery as they were parcelled out, according
to Herodotus, by the Egyptians. For them nothing is too old, nothing is
too new, for to their books of all others is applicable the saying of
D'Alembert that the author kills himself in lengthening out what the
reader kills himself in trying to shorten.
There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never
grow old. Would you know how to recognize “male hysteria” and to
treat it, take down your Sydenham; would you read the experience of
a physician who was himself the subject of asthma, and who,
notwithstanding that, in the words of Dr. Johnson, “panted on till
ninety,” you will find it in the venerable treatise of Sir John Floyer;
would you listen to the story of the King's Evil cured by the royal
touch, as told by a famous chirurgeon who fully believed in it, go
to Wiseman; would you get at first hand the description of the spinal
disease which long bore his name, do not be startled if I tell you to go
to Pott,--to Percival Pott, the great surgeon of the last century.
There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted
by somebody. It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated
physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical
education to know if I had the works of Sanctorius, which he had tried
in vain to find. I could have lent him the “Medicina Statica,” with its
frontispiece showing Sanctorius with his dinner on the table before
him, in his balanced chair which sunk with him below the level of his
banquet-board when he had swallowed a certain number of ounces,--an
early foreshadowing of Pettenkofer's chamber and quantitative
physiology,--but the “Opera Omnia” of Sanctorius I had never met with,
and I fear he had to do without it.
I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works
which we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale
of medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling with
a disrespectful name. Such has always been my own practice. I have
welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as Dioscorides
or Quincy, or Paris or Wood and Bache. I have found a place for St.
John Long, and read the story of his trial for manslaughter with as
much interest as the laurel-water case in which John Hunter figured as
a witness. I would give Samuel Hahnemann a place by the side of Samuel
Thomson. Am I not afraid that some student of imaginative turn and
not provided with the needful cerebral strainers without which all the
refuse of gimcrack intelligences gets into the mental drains and chokes
them up,--am I not afraid that some such student will get hold of
the “Organon” or the “Maladies Chroniques” and be won over by their
delusions, and so be lost to those that love him as a man of common
sense and a brother in their high calling? Not in the least. If he
showed any symptoms of infection I would for once have recourse to
the principle of similia similibus. To cure him of Hahnemann I would
prescribe my favorite homoeopathic antidote, Okie's Bonninghausen.
If that failed, I would order Grauvogl as a heroic remedy, and if he
survived that uncured, I would give him my blessing, if I thought
him honest, and bid him depart in peace. For me he is no longer an
individual. He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be
patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence. We
must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist,
the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy
of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the
circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical
visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his most instructive and
entertaining “Budget of Paradoxes.” I hope, therefore, that our library
will admit the works of the so-called Eclectics, of the Thomsonians, if
any are in existence, of the Clairvoyants, if they have a literature,
and especially of the Homoeopathists. This country seems to be the place
for such a collection, which will by and by be curious and of more value
than at present, for Homoeopathy seems to be following the pathological
law of erysipelas, fading out where it originated as it spreads to new
regions. At least I judge so by the following translated extract from
a criticism of an American work in the “Homoeopatische Rundschau” of
Leipzig for October, 1878, which I find in the “Homoeopathic Bulletin”
for the month of November just passed: “While we feel proud of
the spread and rise of Homoeopathy across the ocean, and while the
Homoeopathic works reaching us from there, and published in a style
such as is unknown in Germany, bear eloquent testimony to the eminent
activity of our transatlantic colleagues, we are overcome by sorrowful
regrets at the position Homoeopathy occupies in Germany. Such a work [as
the American one referred to] with us would be impossible; it would lack
the necessary support.”
By all means let our library secure a good representation of the
literature of Homoeopathy before it leaves us its “sorrowful regrets”
and migrates with its sugar of milk pellets, which have taken the place
of the old pilulae micae panis, to Alaska, to “Nova Zembla, or the Lord
knows where.”
What shall I say in this presence of the duties of a Librarian? Where
have they ever been better performed than in our own public city
library, where the late Mr. Jewett and the living Mr. Winsor have shown
us what a librarian ought to be,--the organizing head, the vigilant
guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not
merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are.
He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a
public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which
naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,--he lays up little honey for
himself, but he conveys the fertilizing pollen from flower to flower.
Our undertaking, just completed,--and just begun--has come at the right
time, not a day too soon. Our practitioners need a library like this,
for with all their skill and devotion there is too little genuine
erudition, such as a liberal profession ought to be able to claim for
many of its members. In reading the recent obituary notices of the late
Dr. Geddings of South Carolina, I recalled what our lamented friend Dr.
Coale used to tell me of his learning and accomplishments, and I could
not help reflecting how few such medical scholars we had to show in
Boston or New England. We must clear up this unilluminated atmosphere,
and here,--here is the true electric light which will irradiate its
darkness.
The public will catch the rays reflected from the same source of
light, and it needs instruction on the great subjects of health and
disease,--needs it sadly. It is preyed upon by every kind of imposition
almost without hindrance. Its ignorance and prejudices react upon
the profession to the great injury of both. The jealous feeling, for
instance, with regard to such provisions for the study of anatomy as are
sanctioned by the laws in this State and carried out with strict
regard to those laws, threatens the welfare, if not the existence of
institutions for medical instruction wherever it is not held in check by
enlightened intelligence. And on the other hand the profession has
just been startled by a verdict against a physician, ruinous in its
amount,--enough to drive many a hard-working young practitioner out
of house and home,--a verdict which leads to the fear that suits for
malpractice may take the place of the panel game and child-stealing as a
means of extorting money. If the profession in this State, which claims
a high standard of civilization, is to be crushed and ground beneath the
upper millstone of the dearth of educational advantages and the lower
millstone of ruinous penalties for what the ignorant ignorantly shall
decide to be ignorance, all I can say is
God save the Commonhealth of Massachusetts!
Once more, we cannot fail to see that just as astrology has given place
to astronomy, so theology, the science of Him whom by searching no man
can find out, is fast being replaced by what we may not improperly call
theonomy, or the science of the laws according to which the Creator
acts. And since these laws find their fullest manifestations for us, at
least, in rational human natures, the study of anthropology is largely
replacing that of scholastic divinity. We must contemplate our Maker
indirectly in human attributes as we talk of Him in human parts of
speech. And this gives a sacredness to the study of man in his physical,
mental, moral, social, and religious nature which elevates the faithful
students of anthropology to the dignity of a priesthood, and sheds a
holy light on the recorded results of their labors, brought together as
they are in such a collection as this which is now spread out before us.
Thus, then, our library is a temple as truly as the dome-crowned
cathedral hallowed by the breath of prayer and praise, where the dead
repose and the living worship. May it, with all its treasures, be
consecrated like that to the glory of God, through the contributions it
shall make to the advancement of sound knowledge, to the relief of human
suffering, to the promotion of harmonious relations between the members
of the two noble professions which deal with the diseases of the soul
and with those of the body, and to the common cause in which all
good men are working, the furtherance of the well-being of their
fellow-creatures!
NOTE.--As an illustration of the statement in the last paragraph but
one, I take the following notice from the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” of
December 4th, the day after the delivery of the address: “Prince Lucien
Bonaparte is now living in London, and is devoting himself to the work
of collecting the creeds of all religions and sects, with a view
to their classification,--his object being simply scientific or
anthropological.”
Since delivering the address, also, I find a leading article in the
“Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic” of November 30th, headed “The
Decadence of Homoeopathy,” abundantly illustrated by extracts from the
“Homoeopathic Times,” the leading American organ of that sect.
In the New York “Medical Record” of the same date, which I had not seen
before the delivery of my address, is an account of the action of the
Homoeopathic Medical Society of Northern New York, in which Hahnemann's
theory of “dynamization” is characterized in a formal resolve as
“unworthy the confidence of the Homoeopathic profession.”
It will be a disappointment to the German Homoeopathists to read in the
“Homoeopathic Times” such a statement as the following: “Whatever the
influences have been which have checked the outward development of
Homoeopathy, it is plainly evident that the Homoeopathic school, as
regards the number of its openly avowed representatives, has attained
its majority, and has begun to decline both in this country and in
England.”
All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the
incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological
inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.
SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS
[A Farewell Address to the Medical School of Harvard University,
November 28, 1882.]
I had intended that the recitation of Friday last should be followed by
a few parting words to my class and any friends who might happen to be
in the lecture-room. But I learned on the preceding evening that there
was an expectation, a desire, that my farewell should take a somewhat
different form; and not to disappoint the wishes of those whom I was
anxious to gratify, I made up my mind to appear before you with such
hasty preparation as the scanty time admitted.
There are three occasions upon which a human being has a right to
consider himself as a centre of interest to those about him: when he is
christened, when he is married, and when he is buried. Every one is the
chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his
own funeral.
There are other occasions, less momentous, in which one may make more
of himself than under ordinary circumstances he would think it proper
to do; when he may talk about himself, and tell his own experiences,
in fact, indulge in a more or less egotistic monologue without fear or
reproach.
I think I may claim that this is one of those occasions. I have
delivered my last anatomical lecture and heard my class recite for the
last time. They wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic mood
than that in which they have known me. Will you not indulge me in
telling you something of my own story?
This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in which I have taken my
place and performed my duties as Professor of Anatomy. For more than
half of my term of office I gave instruction in Physiology, after the
fashion of my predecessors and in the manner then generally prevalent in
our schools, where the physiological laboratory was not a necessary part
of the apparatus of instruction. It was with my hearty approval that the
teaching of Physiology was constituted a separate department and made
an independent Professorship. Before my time, Dr. Warren had taught
Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery in the same course of Lectures, lasting
only three or four months. As the boundaries of science are enlarged,
new divisions and subdivisions of its territories become necessary. In
the place of six Professors in 1847, when I first became a member of
the Faculty, I count twelve upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the
whole number engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical School
amounts to no less than fifty.
Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of
science has undergone a very remarkable transformation. Chemistry and
Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the instructors
of that time. We are looking forward to the synthesis of new organic
compounds; our artificial madder is already in the market, and the
indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will be supplanted by the
manufactured article. In the living body we talk of fuel supplied and
work done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were dealing with a
machine of our own contrivance.
A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of
research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction,
that one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite fabric
was to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do not always
love to pay for. They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web, for these are
the looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes the nakedness of
the intellect. Here are the mills that grind food for its hunger, and
“is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?”
But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of the
past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I teach,
or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught in this
amphitheatre. General anatomy, or histology, on the other hand, is
almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my medical
studies. I never saw a compound microscope during my years of study in
Paris. Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but I never heard
it alluded to by either Professors or students. In descriptive anatomy I
have found little to unlearn, and not a great deal that was both new and
important to learn. Trifling additions are made from year to year, not
to be despised and not to be overvalued. Some of the older anatomical
works are still admirable, some of the newer ones very much the
contrary. I have had recent anatomical plates brought me for inspection,
and I have actually button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as
hard to get rid of as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put
him to shame with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles
in the great folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached
figures of the lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years
of a century old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied,
in the most recent works on anatomy.
I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old Professors, and I
am thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision
for those who are left in need when they lose their offices and their
salaries. I remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me
to get into his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half
sadly, that he was like an old horse,--they had taken off his saddle and
turned him out to pasture. I fear the grass was pretty short where that
old servant of the public found himself grazing. If I myself needed an
apology for holding my office so long, I should find it in the fact that
human anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius
and Fallopius, and that the greater part of my teaching was of such a
nature that it could never become antiquated.