There is another class of remedies which appears to have been employed

occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as to imply a

good deal of common sense among the medical practitioners, as compared

with the superstitions prevailing around them. I have said that I have

caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing the electuary of

millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost incredible fact that

they were retained in the materia medica so late as when Rees's

Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the directions formerly

given by the College of Edinburgh for their preparation. Once or twice

we have found him admitting still more objectionable articles into his

materia medica; in doing which, I am sorry to say that he could plead

grave and learned authority. But these instances are very rare

exceptions in a medical practice of many years, which is, on the whole,

very respectable, considering the time and circumstances.

Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear

occasionally to have been employed by the early practitioners, but they

were such as still had the support of the medical profession. Governor

John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with other

commodities he is writing for. Governor Endicott sends him one he had of

Mr. Humfrey. I hope it was genuine, for they cheated infamously in the

matter of this concretion, which ought to come out of an animal's

stomach, but the real history of which resembles what is sometimes told

of modern sausages.

There is a famous law-case of James the First's time, in which a

goldsmith sold a hundred pounds' worth of what he called bezoar, which

was proved to be false, and the purchaser got a verdict against him.

Governor Endicott also sends Winthrop a unicorn's horn, which was the

property of a certain Mrs. Beggarly, who, in spite of her name, seems to

have been rich in medical knowledge and possessions. The famous Thomas

Bartholinus wrote a treatise on the virtues of this fabulous-sounding

remedy, which was published in 1641, and republished in 1678.

The "antimonial cup," a drinking vessel made of that metal, which, like

our quassia-wood cups, might be filled and emptied in saecula saeculorum

without exhausting its virtues, is mentioned by Matthew Cradock, in a

letter to the elder Winthrop, but in a doubtful way, as it was thought,

he says, to have shortened the days of Sir Nathaniel Riche; and Winthrop

himself, as I think, refers to its use, calling it simply "the cup." An

antimonial cup is included in the inventory of Samuel Seabury, who died

1680, and is valued at five shillings. There is a treatise entitled "The

Universall Remedy, or the Vertues of the Antimoniall Cup, By John Evans,

Minister and Preacher of God's Word, London, 1634," in our own Society's

library.

One other special remedy deserves notice, because of native growth. I do

not know when Culver's root, Leptandra Virginica of our National

Pharmacopoeia, became noted, but Cotton Mather, writing in 1716 to John

Winthrop of New London, speaks of it as famous for the cure of

consumptions, and wishes to get some of it, through his mediation, for

Katharine, his eldest daughter. He gets it, and gives it to the "poor

damsel," who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next

month,--all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and

violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that

spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing

without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length

the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see

by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities for

its wise purposes.

Externally, I find the practitioners on whom I have chiefly relied used

the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably

diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of them

to the modern ones,--to say nothing of "my yellow salve," of Governor

John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply to his

respected descendant.

The authors I find quoted are Barbette's Surgery, Camerarius on Gout, and

Wecherus, of all whom notices may be found in the pages of Haller and

Vanderlinden; also, Reed's Surgery, and Nicholas Culpeper's Practice of

Physic and Anatomy, the last as belonging to Samuel Seabury, chirurgeon,

before mentioned. Nicholas Culpeper was a shrewd charlatan, and as

impudent a varlet as ever prescribed for a colic; but knew very well what

he was about, and badgers the College with great vigor. A copy of

Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the Boston Athenaeum, has the names of

Increase and Samuel Mather written in it, and was doubtless early

overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who refers to the great anatomist's

singular death, among his curious stories in the "Magnalia," and quotes

him among nearly a hundred authors whom he cites in his manuscript "The

Angel of Bethesda." Dr. John Clark's "books and instruments, with

several chirurgery materials in the closet," a were valued in his

inventory at sixty pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a

library valued at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at

sixteen pounds.'

Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further detailed

accounts of medicine and its practitioners. It is necessary to show in a

brief glance what had been going on in Europe during the latter part of

that century, the first quarter of which had been made illustrious in the

history of medical science by the discovery of the circulation.

Charles Barbeyrac, a Protestant in his religion, was a practitioner and

teacher of medicine at Montpellier. His creed was in the way of his

obtaining office; but the young men followed his instructions with

enthusiasm. Religious and scientific freedom breed in and in, until it

becomes hard to tell the family of one from that of the other. Barbeyrac

threw overboard the old complex medical farragos of the pharmacopoeias,

as his church had disburdened itself of the popish ceremonies.

Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen: one

of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an "Essay on the Human

Understanding," three years younger than his teacher; the other, Thomas

Sydenham, five years older. Both returned to England. Locke, whose

medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good fortune

to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of Shaftesbury

was suffering, which led to an operation that saved his life. Less

felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla culinaria

virgo,--which I am afraid would in those days have been translated

kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary department,--who turned

him off after she had got tired of him, and called in another

practitioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124. By John Brown, M. D.

Edinburgh, 1866.] This helped, perhaps, to spoil a promising doctor, and

make an immortal metaphysician. At any rate, Locke laid down the

professional wig and cane, and took to other studies.

The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of

medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy. As Barbeyrac was found in

opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational side

against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with Parliament

against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the College of

Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in their hall by

the side of that of Harvey.

What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this he studied the course of

diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular season;

to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks, instead of

smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out their disease;

he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he, like his teacher, used

few and comparatively simple remedies; he did not give any drug at all,

if he thought none was needed, but let well enough alone. He was a

sensible man, in short, who applied his common sense to diseases which he

had studied with the best light of science that he could obtain.

The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or less

felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the eighteenth

century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and then in

Latin. I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to reform in

the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as there was

in that of the learned big-wigs of the "College," who valued their

remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the extravagant

and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.

During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the

medical profession gave great names to our history. But John Brooks

belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and

mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--subject.

There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin

Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the

early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston,

in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their

patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making

speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his

corporeal republic.

One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth

century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for

small-pox. Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the

course of a hundred years. Prayers had been asked in the churches for

more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times. About a

thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may

infer, chiefly from this cause.

In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared

as an epidemic. In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as was

his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of his

ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as practised

in Turkey, contained in the "Philosophical Transactions." He spoke of it

to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story; for they knew

his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say now-a-days,

many of them, with listening to his "Angel of Bethesda," and satiated

with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.

The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed when

speaking of his honored brethren,--the Reverend Mather was right this

time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong. One only

of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the

practice, in Boston. This is what that person says: "The Small-Pox

spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton

Mather, having had the use of these Communications from Dr. William

Douglass (that is, the writer of these words); surreptitiously, without

the knowledge of his Informer, that he might have the honour of a New

fangled notion, sets an Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country

about 290 were inoculated."

All this has not deprived Cotton Mather of the credit of suggesting, and

a bold and intelligent physician of the honor of carrying out, the new

practice. On the twenty-seventh day of June, 1721, Zabdiel Boylston of

Boston inoculated his only son for smallpox,--the first person ever

submitted to the operation in the New World. The story of the fierce

resistance to the introduction of the practice; of how Boylston was

mobbed, and Mather had a hand-grenade thrown in at his window; of how

William Douglass, the Scotchman, "always positive, and sometimes

accurate," as was neatly said of him, at once depreciated the practice

and tried to get the credit of suggesting it, and how Lawrence Dalhonde,

the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund

Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to

alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would

leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while

in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our

New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,--all this

has been told so well and so often that I spare you its details. Set

this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John

Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application

of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water,

if she has a mole on her arm;--if she swims, she is a witch and must be

hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on her soul!

Thus did America receive this great discovery, destined to save thousands

of lives, via Boston, from the hands of one of our own Massachusetts

physicians.

The year 1735 was rendered sadly memorable by the epidemic of the

terrible disease known as "throat distemper," and regarded by many as the

same as our "diphtheria." Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general use of

mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of their

employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have proved

specially useful.

At some time in the course of this century medical practice had settled

down on four remedies as its chief reliance. I must repeat an incident

which I have related in another of these Essays. When Dr. Holyoke,

nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James Jackson as his

student, he showed him the formidable array of bottles, jars, and drawers

around his office, and then named the four remedies referred to as being

of more importance than all the rest put together. These were "Mercury,

Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian Bark." I doubt if either of them

remembered that, nearly seventy years before, in 1730, Dr. William

Douglass, the disputatious Scotchman, mentioned those same four remedies,

in the dedication of his quarrelsome essay on inoculation, as the most

important ones in the hands of the physicians of his time.

In the "Proceedings" of this Society for the year 1863 is a very pleasant

paper by the late Dr. Ephraim Eliot, giving an account of the leading

physicians of Boston during the last quarter of the last century. The

names of Lloyd, Gardiner, Welsh, Rand, Bulfinch, Danforth, John Warren,

Jeffries, are all famous in local history, and are commemorated in our

medical biographies. One of them, at least, appears to have been more

widely known, not only as one of the first aerial voyagers, but as an

explorer in the almost equally hazardous realm of medical theory. Dr.

John Jeffries, the first of that name, is considered by Broussais as a

leader of medical opinion in America, and so referred to in his famous

"Examen des Doctrines Medicales."

Two great movements took place in this eighteenth century, the effect of

which has been chiefly felt in our own time; namely, the establishment of

the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the founding of the Medical School

of Harvard University.

The third century of our medical history began with the introduction of

the second great medical discovery of modern times,--of all time up to

that date, I may say,--once more via Boston, if we count the University

village as its suburb, and once more by one of our Massachusetts

physicians. In the month of July, 1800, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of

Cambridge submitted four of his own children to the new process of

vaccination,--the first persons vaccinated, as Dr. Zabdiel Boylston's son

had been the first person inoculated in the New World.

A little before the first half of this century was completed, in the

autumn of 1846, the great discovery went forth from the Massachusetts

General Hospital, which repaid the debt of America to the science of the

Old World, and gave immortality to the place of its origin in the memory

and the heart of mankind. The production of temporary insensibility at

will--tuto, cito, jucunde, safely, quickly, pleasantly--is one of those

triumphs over the infirmities of our mortal condition which change the

aspect of life ever afterwards. Rhetoric can add nothing to its glory;

gratitude, and the pride permitted to human weakness, that our Bethlehem

should have been chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the

divine mercy, are all we can yet find room for.

The present century has seen the establishment of all those great

charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of the

mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as among the

chief ornaments of their civilization.

The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of

medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and

great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease)

and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies); but

their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored in

their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past, their

memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient old

dry-nurse, whose "blackdrop" is the never-failing anodyne of the restless

generations of men. Except the lively controversy on inoculation, and

floating papers in journals, we have not much of value for that long

period, in the shape of medical records.

But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to

mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find. Of

these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.

Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical School

of our University, did a great work for the advancement of medicine and

surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and author, greater, it

is claimed by some, than was ever done by any other man. The two

Warrens, of our time, each left a large and permanent record of a most

extended surgical practice. James Jackson not only educated a whole

generation by his lessons of wisdom, but bequeathed some of the most

valuable results of his experience to those who came after him, in a

series of letters singularly pleasant and kindly as well as instructive.

John Ware, keen and cautious, earnest and deliberate, wrote the two

remarkable essays which have identified his name, for all time, with two

important diseases, on which he has shed new light by his original

observations.

I must do violence to the modesty of the living by referring to the many

important contributions to medical science by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, and

especially to his discourse on "Self-limited Diseases," an address which

can be read in a single hour, but the influence of which will be felt for

a century.

Nor would the profession forgive me if I forgot to mention the admirable

museum of pathological anatomy, created almost entirely by the hands of

Dr. John Barnard Swett Jackson, and illustrated by his own printed

descriptive catalogue, justly spoken of by a distinguished professor in

the University of Pennsylvania as the most important contribution which

had ever been made in this country to the branch to which it relates.

When we look at the literature of mental disease, as seen in hospital

reports and special treatises, we can mention the names of Wyman,

Woodward, Brigham, Bell, and Ray, all either natives of Massachusetts or

placed at the head of her institutions for the treatment of the insane.

We have a right to claim also one who is known all over the civilized

world as a philanthropist, to us as a townsman and a graduate of our own

Medical School, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the guide and benefactor of a

great multitude who were born to a world of inward or of outward

darkness.

I cannot pass over in silence the part taken by our own physicians in

those sanitary movements which are assuming every year greater

importance. Two diseases especially have attracted attention, above all

others, with reference to their causes and prevention; cholera, the

"black death" of the nineteenth century, and consumption, the white

plague of the North, both of which have been faithfully studied and

reported on by physicians of our own State and city. The cultivation of

medical and surgical specialties, which is fast becoming prevalent, is

beginning to show its effects in the literature of the profession, which

is every year growing richer in original observations and investigations.

To these benefactors who have labored for us in their peaceful vocation,

we must add the noble army of surgeons, who went with the soldiers who

fought the battles of their country, sharing many of their dangers, not

rarely falling victims to fatigue, disease, or the deadly volleys to

which they often exposed themselves in the discharge of their duties.

The pleasant biographies of the venerable Dr. Thacher, and the worthy and

kind-hearted gleaner, Dr. Stephen W. Williams, who came after him, are

filled with the names of men who served their generation well, and rest

from their labors, followed by the blessing of those for whom they

endured the toils and fatigues inseparable from their calling. The

hardworking, intelligent country physician more especially deserves the

gratitude of his own generation, for he rarely leaves any permanent

record in the literature of his profession. Books are hard to obtain;

hospitals, which are always centres of intelligence, are remote;

thoroughly educated and superior men are separated by wide intervals; and

long rides, though favorable to reflection, take up much of the time

which might otherwise be given to the labors of the study. So it is that

men of ability and vast experience, like the late Dr. Twitchell, for

instance, make a great and deserved reputation, become the oracles of

large districts, and yet leave nothing, or next to nothing, by which

their names shall be preserved from blank oblivion.

One or two other facts deserve mention, as showing the readiness of our

medical community to receive and adopt any important idea or discovery.

The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was first brought

fully before the profession of this country by the translation of

Bichat's great work, "Anatomie Generale," by the late Dr. George Hayward.

The first work printed in this country on Auscultation,--that wonderful

art of discovering disease, which, as it were, puts a window in the

breast, through which the vital organs can be seen, to all intents and

purposes, was the manual published anonymously by "A Member of the

Massachusetts Medical Society."

We are now in some slight measure prepared to weigh the record of the

medical profession in Massachusetts, and pass our judgment upon it. But

in-order to do justice to the first generation of practitioners, we must

compare what we know of their treatment of disease with the state of the

art in England, and the superstitions which they saw all around them in

other departments of knowledge or belief.

English medical literature must have been at a pretty low ebb when

Sydenham recommended Don Quixote to Sir Richard Blackmore for

professional reading. The College Pharmacopoeia was loaded with the most

absurd compound mixtures, one of the most complex of which (the same

which the Reverend Mr. Harward, "Lecturer at the Royal Chappel in

Boston," tried to simplify), was not dropped until the year 1801. Sir

Kenelm Digby was playing his fantastic tricks with the Sympathetic

powder, and teaching Governor Winthrop, the second, how to cure fever and

ague, which some may like to know. "Pare the patient's nails; put the

parings in a little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel,

and put him in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will

recover."

Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of

the royal touch in scrofula. The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at

Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the

manuscripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain

letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer

of the angel Raphael to the good man's medical questions. The

illustrious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe

remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged

man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica.

Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his "friend, Mr. Wintrop," I

cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his

sovereign remedy.

See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most

intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen. Jonathan

Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John

Winthrop about alchemy,--"mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are

for finding it."

Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's

Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal

head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in

the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot

have been surpassed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons

were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking

about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of

gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen.

How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of

nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about

earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father

of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people

remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent

Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if

they belonged to the province of natural science:

Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded our

State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to

show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession

had to assert itself.

Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in the

sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the other

world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown; of the mice

and the prayer-book; of the snake in church; of the calf with two heads;

and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash,--all which innocent

occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming portents.

We can smile at these: but we cannot smile at the account of unhappy Mary

Dyer's malformed offspring; or of Mrs. Hutchinson's domestic misfortune

of similar character, in the story of which the physician, Dr. John Clark

of Rhode Island, alone appears to advantage; or as we read the Rev.

Samuel Willard's fifteen alarming pages about an unfortunate young woman

suffering with hysteria. Or go a little deeper into tragedy, and see

poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at

last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing

mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying

to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.

The cooper's crazy wife--crazy in the belief that she has committed the

unpardonable sin--tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and

the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet

asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself.

Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,"

full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands; a

story in which the awful image of the man in the cage might well turn the

nursery where it is read into a madhouse?

The miserable delusion of witchcraft illustrates, in a still more

impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation of

men with the spiritual world. I have no doubt many physicians shared in

these superstitions. Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of them--were in

the habit of attributing their want of success to the fact, that an "evil

hand" was on their patient. The temptation was strong, no doubt, when

magistrates and ministers and all that followed their lead were contented

with such an explanation. But how was it in Salem, according to Mr.

Upham's own statement? Dr. John Swinnerton was, he says, for many years

the principal physician of Salem. And he says, also, "The Swinnerton

family were all along opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept remarkably clear

from the witchcraft delusion." Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the

way, whose memory is illuminated by a ray from the genius of

Hawthorne--died the very year before the great witchcraft explosion took

place. But who can doubt that it was from him that the family had

learned to despise and to resist the base superstition; or that Bridget

Bishop, whose house he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person

hanged in the time of the delusion, would have found an efficient

protector in her tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of

his family to the misguided clergymen and magistrates?

I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-World

medical superstitions, and I have no question that they were more or less

involved in the prevailing errors of the community in which they lived.

But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so far as we can get at

it; and where it is questionable we must remember that there must have

been many little-educated persons among them; and that all must have

felt, to some extent, the influence of those sincere and devoted but

unsafe men, the physic-practising clergymen, who often used spiritual

means as a substitute for temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric

patient as possessed by the devil, and treated a fractured skull by

prayers and plasters, following the advice of a ruling elder in

opposition to the "unanimous opinion of seven surgeons."

To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead, may

be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has left on

record the product of his labors in the double capacity of clergyman and

physician.

I have had the privilege of examining a manuscript of Cotton Mather's

relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the American

Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs. A brief notice of this

curious document may prove not uninteresting.

It is entitled "The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay upon the Common Maladies

of Mankind, offering, first, the sentiments of Piety," etc., etc., and "a

collection of plain but potent and Approved REMEDIES for the Maladies."

There are sixty-six "Capsula's," as he calls them, or chapters, in his

table of contents; of which, five--from the fifteenth to the nineteenth,

inclusive--are missing. This is a most unfortunate loss, as the

eighteenth capsula treated of agues, and we could have learned from it

something of their degree of frequency in this part of New England.

There is no date to the manuscript; which, however, refers to a case

observed Nov. 14, 1724.

The divine takes precedence of the physician in this extraordinary

production. He begins by preaching a sermon at his unfortunate patient.

Having thrown him into a cold sweat by his spiritual sudorific, he

attacks him with his material remedies, which are often quite as

unpalatable. The simple and cleanly practice of Sydenham, with whose

works he was acquainted, seems to have been thrown away upon him.

Everything he could find mentioned in the seventy or eighty authors he

cites, all that the old women of both sexes had ever told him of, gets

into his text, or squeezes itself into his margin.

Evolving disease out of sin, he hates it, one would say, as he hates its

cause, and would drive it out of the body with all noisome appliances.

"Sickness is in Fact Flagellum Dei pro peccatis mundi." So saying, he

encourages the young mother whose babe is wasting away upon her breast

with these reflections:

"Think; oh the grievous Effects of Sin! This wretched Infant has not

arrived unto years of sense enough, to sin after the similitude of the

transgression committed by Adam. Nevertheless the Transgression of Adam,

who had all mankind Foederally, yea, Naturally, in him, has involved this

Infant in the guilt of it. And the poison of the old serpent, which

infected Adam when he fell into his Transgression, by hearkening to the

Tempter, has corrupted all mankind, and is a seed unto such diseases as

this Infant is now laboring under. Lord, what are we, and what are our

children, but a Generation of Vipers?"

Many of his remedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and utter

want of judgment betray themselves everywhere. He piles his

prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination. He is

run away with by all sorts of fancies and superstitions. He prescribes

euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing confidently to

the strange old doctrine of signatures, which inferred its use from the

resemblance of its flower to the organ of vision. For the scattering of

wens, the efficacy of a Dead Hand has been out of measure wonderful.

But when he once comes to the odious class of remedies, he revels in them

like a scarabeus. This allusion will bring us quite near enough to the

inconceivable abominations with which he proposed to outrage the sinful

stomachs of the unhappy confederates and accomplices of Adam.

It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are passages in

it worth preserving. He speaks of some remedies which have since become

more universally known:

"Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five [Six]

as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health: and his

favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and Elder."

"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors. The

QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"

Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--"This is now in its reign; the most

fashionable vomit."

"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."

He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from

flesh as often useful in children's diseases.

One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases,

at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed

source of our distempers:

"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we

employ thee to kill them that kill us.

"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way

for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing like

Mercurial Deobstruents."

From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the

subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.

His poetical turn shows itself here and there:

"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a Cough,

what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...

If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the

millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of

that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound,

putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron and other

drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.

The "Capsula" entitled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at New

London, and is in the possession of our own Society. He means, by these

words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses

in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the "Vicar of

Wakefield." "Many of the Ancients thought there was much of a Real

History in the Parable, and their Opinion was that there is, DIAPHORA

KATA TAS MORPHAS, A Distinction (and so a Resemblance) of men as to their

Shapes after Death." And so on, with Ireaeus, Tertullian, Thespesius,

and "the TA TONE PSEUCONE CROMATA," in the place of "Sanconiathon,

Manetho, Berosus," and "Anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan."

One other passage deserves notice, as it relates to the single medical

suggestion which does honor to Cotton Mather's memory. It does not

appear that he availed himself of the information which he says, he

obtained from his slave, for such I suppose he was.

In his appendix to "Variolae Triumphatae," he says,--

"There has been a wonderful practice lately used in several parts of the

world, which indeed is not yet become common in our nation.

"I was first informed of it by a Garamantee servant of my own, long

before I knew that any Europeans or Asiaticks had the least acquaintance

with it, and some years before I was enriched with the communications of

the learned Foreigners, whose accounts I found agreeing with what I

received of my servant, when he shewed me the Scar of the Wound made for

the operation; and said, That no person ever died of the smallpox, in

their countrey, that had the courage to use it.

"I have since met with a considerable Number of these Africans, who all

agree in one story; That in their countrey grandy-many dy of the

small-pox: But now they learn this way: people take juice of smallpox and

cutty-skin and put in a Drop; then by'nd by a little sicky, sicky: then

very few little things like small-pox; and nobody dy of it; and nobody

have small-pox any more. Thus, in Africa, where the poor creatures dy of

the smallpox like Rotten Sheep, a merciful God has taught them an

Infallible preservative. 'T is a common practice, and is attended with a

constant success."

What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice, in the

hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and reasonable. I

suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which the colonists

found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out of them, as the

exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians and surgeons in the

late war. Good food and enough of it, pure air and water, cleanliness,

good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate, a stimulant, quinine, and two

or three common drugs, proved to be the marrow of medical treatment; and

the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went the way of embroidered shirts and

white kid gloves and malacca joints, in their time of need. "Good wine

is the best cordiall for her," said Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to

Samuel Symonds, speaking of that gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham,

instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary for

his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development

until it became entirely separated from that of divinity. The spiritual

guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into the

secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of duties; but the healer

of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of God in nature,

as he sees their miracles with his own eyes. No doctrine of prayer or

special providence is to be his excuse for not looking straight at

secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience justifies him,

as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be.

While pious men were praying--humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to

their knowledge--over the endless succession of little children dying of

spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some

holes in the walls of the ward, let God's blessed air in on the little

creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it was

soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand lives of

these infant heirs of immortality. [Collins's Midwifery, p. 312.

Published by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was

granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications. Still, the habit of

dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and another

way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which knowledge

and way of thought are special means granted by Providence, and to be

thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying, so

often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo

athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists."

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly, if

not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical

commerce. The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those

memorable words, which you may read over the professor's chair in the

French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit," "I dressed

his wound, and God healed it,"--is a different being from the God that

scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or shaped

even from the sacred pages which have proved so plastic in their hands.

He is a God who never leaves himself without witness, who repenteth him

of the evil, who never allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the

enjoyment of life, to take its course without establishing an effort,

limited by certain fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always,

to restore the broken body or the shattered mind. In the perpetual

presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds,

who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural

process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital

organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who

sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due

order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual

presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the

theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no

organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly,

where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets

its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies,

and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God

of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism,

call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably

come nearer the truth.

I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the

materializing influences to which the physician is subjected. A spiritual

guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us all, from becoming

the "fingering slaves" that Wordsworth treats with such shrivelling

scorn. But it is well that the two callings have been separated, and it

is fitting that they remain apart. In settling the affairs of the late

concern, I am afraid our good friends remain a little in our debt. We

lent them our physician Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they

returned him so damaged by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes.

Their Reverend Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case

of hysteria; and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith's

Dictionary of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship

of the Pentateuch. Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters

concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight with

his "Nishmath Chajim."

Yet we must remember that the name of Basil Valentine, the monk, is

associated with whatever good and harm we can ascribe to antimony; and

that the most remarkable of our specifics long bore the name of "Jesuit's

Bark," from an old legend connected with its introduction. "Frere

Jacques," who taught the lithotomists of Paris, owes his ecclesiastical

title to courtesy, as he did not belong to a religious order.

Medical science, and especially the study of mental disease, is destined,

I believe, to react to much greater advantage on the theology of the

future than theology has acted on medicine in the past. The liberal

spirit very generally prevailing in both professions, and the good

understanding between their most enlightened members, promise well for

the future of both in a community which holds every point of human

belief, every institution in human hands, and every word written in a

human dialect, open to free discussion today, to-morrow, and to the end

of time. Whether the world at large will ever be cured of trusting to

specifics as a substitute for observing the laws of health, and to

mechanical or intellectual formula as a substitute for character, may

admit of question. Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal.

We can find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day, only having

changed their dresses and the social spheres in which they thrive. We

think the quarrels of Galenists and chemists belong to the past,

forgetting that Thomsonism has its numerous apostles in our community;

that it is common to see remedies vaunted as purely vegetable, and that

the prejudice against "mineral poisons," especially mercury, is as strong

in many quarters now as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth

century. Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but

beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard. The oaks

of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the

Pythoness and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very

moderate compensation. Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time;

but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers

year after year, which seems to imply that he found believers and

patrons. You smiled when I related Sir Kenelm Digby's prescription with

the live eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets,

would there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut,

carried about as a cure for rheumatism? The brazen head of Roger Bacon

is mute; but is not "Planchette" uttering her responses in a hundred

houses of this city? We think of palmistry or chiromancy as belonging to

the days of Albertus Magnus, or, if existing in our time, as given over

to the gypsies; but a very distinguished person has recently shown me the

line of life, and the line of fortune, on the palm of his hand, with a

seeming confidence in the sanguine predictions of his career which had

been drawn from them. What shall we say of the plausible and

well-dressed charlatans of our own time, who trade in false pretences,

like Nicholas Knapp of old, but without any fear of being fined or

whipped; or of the many follies and inanities, imposing on the credulous

part of the community, each of them gaping with eager, open mouth for a

gratuitous advertisement by the mention of its foolish name in any

respectable connection?

I turn from this less pleasing aspect of the common intelligence which

renders such follies possible, to close the honorable record of the

medical profession in this, our ancient Commonwealth.

We have seen it in the first century divided among clergymen,

magistrates, and regular practitioners; yet, on the whole, for the time,

and under the circumstances, respectable, except where it invoked

supernatural agencies to account for natural phenomena.

In the second century it simplified its practice, educated many

intelligent practitioners, and began the work of organizing for concerted

action, and for medical teaching.

In this, our own century, it has built hospitals, perfected and

multiplied its associations and educational institutions, enlarged and

created museums, and challenged a place in the world of science by its

literature.

In reviewing the whole course of its history we read a long list of

honored names, and a precious record written in private memories, in

public charities, in permanent contributions to medical science, in

generous sacrifices for the country. We can point to our capital as the

port of entry for the New World of the great medical discoveries of two

successive centuries, and we can claim for it the triumph over the most

dreaded foe that assails the human body,--a triumph which the annals of

the race can hardly match in three thousand years of medical history.

THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER

[A Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the Bellevue

Hospital College, March 2, 1871.]

The occasion which calls us together reminds us not a little of that

other ceremony which unites a man and woman for life. The banns have

already been pronounced which have wedded our young friends to the

profession of their choice. It remains only to address to them some

friendly words of cheering counsel, and to bestow upon them the parting

benediction.

This is not the time for rhetorical display or ambitious eloquence. We

must forget ourselves, and think only of them. To us it is an occasion;

to them it is an epoch. The spectators at the wedding look curiously at

the bride and bridegroom; at the bridal veil, the orange-flower garland,

the giving and receiving of the ring; they listen for the tremulous "I

will," and wonder what are the mysterious syllables the clergyman

whispers in the ear of the married maiden. But to the newly-wedded pair

what meaning in those words, "for better, for worse," "in sickness and in

health," "till death us do part!" To the father, to the mother, who know

too well how often the deadly nightshade is interwoven with the wreath of

orange-blossoms, how empty the pageant, how momentous the reality!

You will not wonder that I address myself chiefly to those who are just

leaving academic life for the sterner struggle and the larger tasks of

matured and instructed manhood. The hour belongs to them; if others find

patience to listen, they will kindly remember that, after all, they are

but as the spectators at the wedding, and that the priest is thinking

less of them than of their friends who are kneeling at the altar.

I speak more directly to you, then, gentlemen of the graduating class.

The days of your education, as pupils of trained instructors, are over.

Your first harvest is all garnered. Henceforth you are to be sowers as

well as reapers, and your field is the world. How does your knowledge

stand to-day? What have you gained as a permanent possession? What must

you expect to forget? What remains for you yet to learn? These are

questions which it may interest you to consider.

There is another question which must force itself on the thoughts of many

among you: "How am I to obtain patients and to keep their confidence?"

You have chosen a laborious calling, and made many sacrifices to fit

yourselves for its successful pursuit. You wish to be employed that you

may be useful, and that you may receive the reward of your industry. I

would take advantage of these most receptive moments to give you some

hints which may help you to realize your hopes and expectations. Such is

the outline of the familiar talk I shall offer you.

Your acquaintance with some of the accessory branches is probably greater

now than it will be in a year from now,--much greater than it will by ten

years from now. The progress of knowledge, it may be feared, or hoped,

will have outrun the text-books in which you studied these branches.

Chemistry, for instance, is very apt to spoil on one's hands. "Nous

avons change tout cela" might serve as the standing motto of many of our

manuals. Science is a great traveller, and wears her shoes out pretty

fast, as might be expected.

You are now fresh from the lecture-room and the laboratory. You can pass

an examination in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, which

the men in large practice all around you would find a more potent

sudorific than any in the Pharmacopceia. These masters of the art of

healing were once as ready with their answers as you are now, but they

have got rid of a great deal of the less immediately practical part of

their acquisitions, and you must undergo the same depleting process.

Hard work will train it off, as sharp exercise trains off the fat of a

prize-fighter.

Yet, pause a moment before you infer that your teachers must have been in

fault when they furnished you with mental stores not directly convertible

to practical purposes, and likely in a few years to lose their place in

your memory. All systematic knowledge involves much that is not

practical, yet it is the only kind of knowledge which satisfies the mind,

and systematic study proves, in the long-run, the easiest way of

acquiring and retaining facts which are practical. There are many things

which we can afford to forget, which yet it was well to learn. Your

mental condition is not the same as if you had never known what you now

try in vain to recall. There is a perpetual metempsychosis of thought,

and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil in the forgotten facts of

yesterday. You cannot see anything in the new season of the guano you

placed last year about the roots of your climbing plants, but it is

blushing and breathing fragrance in your trellised roses; it has scaled

your porch in the bee-haunted honey-suckle; it has found its way where

the ivy is green; it is gone where the woodbine expands its luxuriant

foliage.

Your diploma seems very broad to-day with your list of accomplishments,

but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau de Chagrin of

Balzac's story. Do not worry about it, for all the while there will be

making out for you an ampler and fairer parchment, signed by old Father

Time himself as President of that great University in which experience is

the one perpetual and all-sufficient professor.

Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge

that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth

Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business,

your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the well-known

foramina of the sphenoid bone and the familiar oxides of

methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium. Be thankful that you have once known

them, and remember that even the learned ignorance of a nomenclature is

something to have mastered, and may furnish pegs to hang facts upon which

would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory in loose disorder.

But your education has, after all, been very largely practical. You have

studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the bedside

and in the operating amphitheatre. It is the special advantage of large

cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing a great deal of disease

in a short space of time, and of seeing many cases of the same kind of

disease brought together. Let us not be unjust to the claims of the

schools remote from the larger centres of population. Who among us has

taught better than Nathan Smith, better than Elisha Bartlett? who teaches

better than some of our living contemporaries who divide their time

between city and country schools? I am afraid we do not always do

justice to our country brethren, whose merits are less conspicuously

exhibited than those of the great city physicians and surgeons, such

especially as have charge of large hospitals. There are modest

practitioners living in remote rural districts who are gifted by nature

with such sagacity and wisdom, trained so well in what is most essential

to the practice of their art, taught so thoroughly by varied experience,

forced to such manly self-reliance by their comparative isolation, that,

from converse with them alone, from riding with them on their long rounds

as they pass from village to village, from talking over cases with them,

putting up their prescriptions, watching their expedients, listening to

their cautions, marking the event of their predictions, hearing them tell

of their mistakes, and now and then glory a little in the detection of

another's blunder, a young man would find himself better fitted for his

real work than many who have followed long courses of lectures and passed

a showy examination. But the young man is exceptionally fortunate who

enjoys the intimacy of such a teacher. And it must be confessed that the

great hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries of large cities, where men

of well-sifted reputations are in constant attendance, are the true

centres of medical education. No students, I believe, are more

thoroughly aware of this than those who have graduated at this

institution. Here, as in all our larger city schools, the greatest pains

are taken to teach things as well as names. You have entered into the

inheritance of a vast amount of transmitted skill and wisdom, which you

have taken, warm, as it were, with the life of your well-schooled

instructors. You have not learned all that art has to teach you, but you

are safer practitioners to-day than were many of those whose names we

hardly mention without a genuflection. I had rather be cared for in a

fever by the best-taught among you than by the renowned Fernelius or the

illustrious Boerhaave, could they come back to us from that better world

where there are no physicians needed, and, if the old adage can be

trusted, not many within call. I had rather have one of you exercise his

surgical skill upon me than find myself in the hands of a resuscitated

Fabricius Hildanus, or even of a wise Ambroise Pare, revisiting earth in

the light of the nineteenth century.

You will not accuse me of underrating your accomplishments. You know

what to do for a child in a fit, for an alderman in an apoplexy, for a

girl that has fainted, for a woman in hysterics, for a leg that is

broken, for an arm that is out of joint, for fevers of every color, for

the sailor's rheumatism, and the tailor's cachexy. In fact you do really

know so much at this very hour, that nothing but the searching test of

time can fully teach you the limitations of your knowledge.

Of some of these you will permit me to remind you. You will never have

outgrown the possibility of new acquisitions, for Nature is endless in

her variety. But even the knowledge which you may be said to possess

will be a different thing after long habit has made it a part of your

existence. The tactus eruditus extends to the mind as well as to the

finger-ends. Experience means the knowledge gained by habitual trial,

and an expert is one who has been in the habit of trying. This is the

kind of knowledge that made Ulysses wise in the ways of men. Many cities

had he seen, and known the minds of those who dwelt in them. This

knowledge it was that Chaucer's Shipman brought home with him from the

sea--

"In many a tempest had his berd be shake."

This is the knowledge we place most confidence in, in the practical

affairs of life.

Our training has two stages. The first stage deals with our

intelligence, which takes the idea of what is to be done with the most

charming ease and readiness. Let it be a game of billiards, for

instance, which the marker is going to teach us. We have nothing to do

but to make this ball glance from that ball and hit that other ball, and

to knock that ball with this ball into a certain caecal sacculus or

diverticulum which our professional friend calls a pocket. Nothing can

be clearer; it is as easy as "playing upon this pipe," for which Hamlet

gives Guildenstern such lucid directions. But this intelligent Me, who

steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to

be a terrible bungler. He misses those glancing hits which the

hard-featured young professional person calls "carroms," and insists on

pocketing his own ball instead of the other one.

It is the unintelligent Me, stupid as an idiot, that has to try a thing a

thousand times before he can do it, and then never knows how he does it,

that at last does it well. We have to educate ourselves through the

pretentious claims of intellect, into the humble accuracy of instinct,

and we end at last by acquiring the dexterity, the perfection, the

certainty, which those masters of arts, the bee and the spider, inherit

from Nature.

Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in the

brain. But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the senses,

in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,--all over the

man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through every part of

those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as a brain. See a

skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old physician smile away

a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton would soon be sent for;

mark what a large experience has done for those who were fitted to profit

by it, and you will feel convinced that, much as you know, something is

still left for you to learn.

May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice,

something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion under?

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows-the exceptions. The

young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his patient's

family, dead and alive, up and down for generations. He can tell

beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be subject to, what

they will die of if they live long enough, and whether they had better

live at all, or remain unrealized possibilities, as belonging to a stock

not worth being perpetuated. The young man feels uneasy if he is not

continually doing something to stir up his patient's internal

arrangements. The old man takes things more quietly, and is much more

willing to let well enough alone: All these superiorities, if such they

are,'you must wait for time to bring you. In the meanwhile (if we will

let the lion be uppermost for a moment), the young man's senses are

quicker than those of his older rival. His education in all the

accessory branches is more recent, and therefore nearer the existing

condition of knowledge. He finds it easier than his seniors to accept

the improvements which every year is bringing forward. New ideas build

their nests in young men's brains. "Revolutions are not made by men in

spectacles," as I once heard it remarked, and the first whispers of a new

truth are not caught by those who begin to feel the need of an

ear-trumpet. Granting all these advantages to the young man, he ought,

nevertheless, to go on improving, on the whole, as a medical

practitioner, with every year, until he has ripened into a well-mellowed

maturity. But, to improve, he must be good for something at the start.

If you ship a poor cask of wine to India and back, if you keep it a half

a century, it only grows thinner and sharper.

You are soon to enter into relations with the public, to expend your

skill and knowledge for its benefit, and find your support in the rewards

of your labor. What kind of a constituency is this which is to look to

you as its authorized champions in the struggle of life against its

numerous enemies?

In the first place, the persons who seek the aid of the physician are

very honest and sincere in their wish to get rid of their complaints,

and, generally speaking, to live as long as they can. However

attractively the future is painted to them, they are attached to the

planet with which they are already acquainted. They are addicted to the

daily use of this empirical and unchemical mixture which we call air; and

would hold on to it as a tippler does to his alcoholic drinks. There is

nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover

their health and save their lives. They have submitted to be

half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to

their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to

be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their

flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of

abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded

were a costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were

a luxury. What more can be asked to prove their honesty and sincerity?

This same community is very intelligent with respect to a great many

subjects-commerce, mechanics, manufactures, politics. But with regard to

medicine it is hopelessly ignorant and never finds it out. I do not know

that it is any worse in this country than in Great Britain, where Mr.

Huxley speaks very freely of "the utter ignorance of the simplest laws of

their own animal life, which prevails among even the most highly educated

persons." And Cullen said before him "Neither the acutest genius nor the

soundest judgment will avail in judging of a particular science, in

regard to which they have not been exercised. I have been obliged to

please my patients sometimes with reasons, and I have found that any will

pass, even with able divines and acute lawyers; the same will pass with

the husbands as with the wives." If the community could only be made

aware of its own utter ignorance, and incompetence to form opinions on

medical subjects, difficult enough to those who give their lives to the

study of them, the practitioner would have an easier task. But it will

form opinions of its own, it cannot help it, and we cannot blame it, even

though we know how slight and deceptive are their foundations.

This is the way it happens: Every grown-up person has either been ill

himself or had a friend suffer from illness, from which he has recovered.

Every sick person has done something or other by somebody's advice, or of

his own accord, a little before getting better. There is an irresistible

tendency to associate the thing done, and the improvement which followed

it, as cause and effect. This is the great source of fallacy in medical

practice. But the physician has some chance of correcting his hasty

inference. He thinks his prescription cured a single case of a

particular complaint; he tries it in twenty similar cases without effect,

and sets down the first as probably nothing more than a coincidence. The

unprofessional experimenter or observer has no large experience to

correct his hasty generalization. He wants to believe that the means he

employed effected his cure. He feels grateful to the person who advised

it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him, and he has a

kind of monumental pride in himself as a living testimony to its

efficacy. So it is that you will find the community in which you live,

be it in town or country, full of brands plucked from the burning, as

they believe, by some agency which, with your better training, you feel

reasonably confident had nothing to do with it. Their disease went out

of itself, and the stream from the medical fire-annihilator had never

even touched it.

You cannot and need not expect to disturb the public in the possession of

its medical superstitions. A man's ignorance is as much his private

property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his family Bible. You have

only to open your own Bible at the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel,

and you will find that the logic of a restored patient was very simple

then, as it is now, and very hard to deal with. My clerical friends will

forgive me for poaching on their sacred territory, in return for an

occasional raid upon the medical domain of which they have now and then

been accused.

A blind man was said to have been restored to sight by a young person

whom the learned doctors of the Jewish law considered a sinner, and, as

such, very unlikely to have been endowed with a divine gift of healing.

They visited the patient repeatedly, and evidently teased him with their

questions about the treatment, and their insinuations about the young

man, until he lost his temper. At last he turned sharply upon them:

"Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that,

whereas I was blind, now I see."

This is the answer that always has been and always will be given by most

persons when they find themselves getting well after doing anything, no

matter what,--recommended by anybody, no matter whom. Lord Bacon, Robert

Boyle, Bishop Berkeley, all put their faith in panaceas which we should

laugh to scorn. They had seen people get well after using them. Are we

any wiser than those great men? Two years ago, in a lecture before the

Massachusetts Historical Society, I mentioned this recipe of Sir Kenelm

Digby for fever and ague: Pare the patient's nails; put the parings in a

little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel, and place him

in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will recover.

Referring to this prescription in the course of the same lecture, I said:

"You smiled when I related Sir Kenehn Digby's prescription, with the live

eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets, would

there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut, carried

about as a cure for rheumatism?" Nobody saw fit to empty his or her

pockets, and my question brought no response. But two months ago I was in

a company of educated persons, college graduates every one of them, when

a gentleman, well known in our community, a man of superior ability and

strong common-sense, on the occasion of some talk arising about

rheumatism, took a couple of very shiny horse-chestnuts from his

breeches-pocket, and laid them on the table, telling us how, having

suffered from the complaint in question, he had, by the advice of a

friend, procured these two horse-chestnuts on a certain time a year or

more ago, and carried them about him ever since; from which very day he

had been entirely free from rheumatism.

This argument, from what looks like cause and effect, whether it be so or

not, is what you will have to meet wherever you go, and you need not

think you can answer it. In the natural course of things some thousands

of persons must be getting well or better of slight attacks of colds, of

rheumatic pains, every week, in this city alone. Hundreds of them do

something or other in the way of remedy, by medical or other advice, or

of their own motion, and the last thing they do gets the credit of the

recovery. Think what a crop of remedies this must furnish, if it were

all harvested!

Experience has taught, or will teach you, that most of the wonderful

stories patients and others tell of sudden and signal cures are like Owen

Glendower's story of the portents that announced his birth. The earth

shook at your nativity, did it? Very likely, and

"So it would have done,

At the same season, if your mother's cat

Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born."

You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling Welshman,

for ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact, and, like infancy, which it

resembles, should be respected. Once in a while you will have a patient

of sense, born with the gift of observation, from whom you may learn

something. When you find yourself in the presence of one who is fertile

of medical opinions, and affluent in stories of marvellous cures,--of a

member of Congress whose name figures in certificates to the value of

patent medicines, of a voluble dame who discourses on the miracles she

has wrought or seen wrought with the little jokers of the sugar-of-milk

globule-box, take out your watch and count the pulse; also note the time

of day, and charge the price of a visit for every extra fifteen, or, if

you are not very busy, every twenty minutes. In this way you will turn

what seems a serious dispensation into a double blessing, for this class

of patients loves dearly to talk, and it does them a deal of good, and

you feel as if you had earned your money by the dose you have taken,

quite as honestly as by any dose you may have ordered.

You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it. You

wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing this which

you will find useful,--deserve it. But, to deserve it in full measure,

you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired.

As the basis of all the rest, you must have all those traits of character

which fit you to enter into the most intimate and confidential relations

with the families of which you are the privileged friend and counsellor.

Medical Christianity, if I may use such a term, is of very early date.

By the oath of Hippocrates, the practitioner of ancient times bound

himself to enter his patient's house with the sole purpose of doing him

good, and so to conduct himself as to avoid the very appearance of evil.

Let the physician of to-day begin by coming up to this standard, and add

to it all the more recently discovered virtues and graces.

A certain amount of natural ability is requisite to make you a good

physician, but by no means that disproportionate development of some

special faculty which goes by the name of genius. A just balance of the

mental powers is a great deal more likely to be useful than any single

talent, even were it the power of observation; in excess. For a mere

observer is liable to be too fond of facts for their own sake, so that,

if he told the real truth, he would confess that he takes more pleasure

in a post-mortem examination which shows him what was the matter with a

patient, than in a case which insists on getting well and leaving him in

the dark as to its nature. Far more likely to interfere with the sound

practical balance of the mind is that speculative, theoretical tendency

which has made so many men noted in their day, whose fame has passed away

with their dissolving theories. Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the

famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie,

and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations

betrayed a man of many admirable qualities.

I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession.

Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of

arts. It will task all your powers of body and mind if you are faithful

to it. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the

enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden

waters of alien sciences. The great practitioners are generally those

who concentrate all their powers on their business. If there are here

and there brilliant exceptions, it is only in virtue of extraordinary

gifts, and industry to which very few are equal.

To get business a man mast really want it; and do you suppose that when

you are in the middle of a heated caucus, or half-way through a delicate

analysis, or in the spasm of an unfinished ode, your eyes rolling in the

fine frenzy of poetical composition, you want to be called to a teething

infant, or an ancient person groaning under the griefs of a lumbago? I

think I have known more than one young man whose doctor's sign proclaimed

his readiness to serve mankind in that capacity, but who hated the sound

of a patient's knock, and as he sat with his book or his microscope, felt

exactly as the old party expressed himself in my friend Mr. Brownell's

poem--

"All I axes is, let me alone."

The community soon finds out whether you are in earnest, and really mean

business, or whether you are one of those diplomaed dilettanti who like

the amusement of quasi medical studies, but have no idea of wasting their

precious time in putting their knowledge in practice for the benefit of

their suffering fellow-creatures.

The public is a very incompetent judge of your skill and knowledge, but

it gives its confidence most readily to those who stand well with their

professional brethren, whom they call upon when they themselves or their

families are sick, whom they choose to honorable offices, whose writings

and teachings they hold in esteem. A man may be much valued by the

profession and yet have defects which prevent his becoming a favorite

practitioner, but no popularity can be depended upon as permanent which

is not sanctioned by the judgment of professional experts, and with these

you will always stand on your substantial merits.

What shall I say of the personal habits you must form if you wish for

success? Temperance is first upon the list. Intemperance in a physician

partakes of the guilt of homicide, for the muddled brain may easily make

a fatal blunder in a prescription and the unsteady hand transfix an

artery in an operation. Tippling doctors have been too common in the

history of medicine. Paracelsus was a sot, Radcliffe was much too fond

of his glass, and Dr. James Hurlbut of Wethersfield, Connecticut, a

famous man in his time, used to drink a square bottle of rum a day, with

a corresponding allowance of opium to help steady his nerves. We

commonly speak of a man as being the worse for liquor, but I was asking

an Irish laborer one day about his doctor, who, as he said, was somewhat

given to drink. "I like him best when he's a little that way," he said;

"then I can spake to him." I pitied the poor patient who could not

venture to allude to his colic or his pleurisy until his physician was

tipsy.

There are personal habits of less gravity than the one I have mentioned

which it is well to guard against, or, if they are formed, to relinquish.

A man who may be called at a moment's warning into the fragrant boudoir

of suffering loveliness should not unsweeten its atmosphere with

reminiscences of extinguished meerschaums. He should remember that the

sick are sensitive and fastidious, that they love the sweet odors and the

pure tints of flowers, and if his presence is not like the breath of the

rose, if his hands are not like the leaf of the lily, his visit may be

unwelcome, and if he looks behind him he may see a window thrown open

after he has left the sick-chamber. I remember too well the old doctor

who sometimes came to help me through those inward griefs to which

childhood is liable. "Far off his coming "--shall I say "shone," and

finish the Miltonic phrase, or leave the verb to the happy conjectures of

my audience? Before him came a soul-subduing whiff of ipecacuanha, and

after him lingered a shuddering consciousness of rhubarb. He had lived

so much among his medicaments that he had at last become himself a drug,

and to have him pass through a sick-chamber was a stronger dose than a

conscientious disciple of Hahnemann would think it safe to administer.

Need I remind you of the importance of punctuality in your engagements,

and of the worry and distress to patients and their friends which the

want of it occasions? One of my old teachers always carried two watches,

to make quite sure of being exact, and not only kept his appointments

with the regularity of a chronometer, but took great pains to be at his

patient's house at the time when he had reason to believe he was

expected, even if no express appointment was made. It is a good rule; if

you call too early, my lady's hair may not be so smooth as could be

wished, and, if you keep her waiting too long, her hair may be smooth,

but her temper otherwise.

You will remember, of course, always to get the weather-gage of your

patient. I mean, to place him so that the light falls on his face and

not on yours. It is a kind of, ocular duel that is about to take place

between you; you are going to look through his features into his

pulmonary and hepatic and other internal machinery, and he is going to

look into yours quite as sharply to see what you think about his

probabilities for time or eternity.

No matter how hard he stares at your countenance, he should never be able

to read his fate in it. It should be cheerful as long as there is hope,

and serene in its gravity when nothing is left but resignation. The face

of a physician, like that of a diplomatist, should be impenetrable.

Nature is a benevolent old hypocrite; she cheats the sick and the dying

with illusions better than any anodynes. If there are cogent reasons why

a patient should be undeceived, do it deliberately and advisedly, but do

not betray your apprehensions through your tell-tale features.

We had a physician in our city whose smile was commonly reckoned as being

worth five thousand dollars a year to him, in the days, too, of moderate

incomes. You cannot put on such a smile as that any more than you can

get sunshine without sun; there was a tranquil and kindly nature under it

that irradiated the pleasant face it made one happier to meet on his

daily rounds. But you can cultivate the disposition, and it will work

its way through to the surface, nay, more,--you can try to wear a quiet

and encouraging look, and it will react on your disposition and make you

like what you seem to be, or at least bring you nearer to its own

likeness.

Your patient has no more right to all the truth you know than he has to

all the medicine in your saddlebags, if you carry that kind of

cartridge-box for the ammunition that slays disease. He should get only

just so much as is good for him. I have seen a physician examining a

patient's chest stop all at once, as he brought out a particular sound

with a tap on the collarbone, in the attitude of a pointer who has just

come on the scent or sight of a woodcock. You remember the Spartan boy,

who, with unmoved countenance, hid the fox that was tearing his vitals

beneath his mantle. What he could do in his own suffering you must learn

to do for others on whose vital organs disease has fastened its devouring

teeth. It is a terrible thing to take away hope, even earthly hope, from

a fellow-creature. Be very careful what names you let fall before your

patient. He knows what it means when you tell him he has tubercles or

Bright's disease, and, if he hears the word carcinoma, he will certainly

look it out in a medical dictionary, if he does not interpret its dread

significance on the instant. Tell him he has asthmatic symptoms, or a

tendency to the gouty diathesis, and he will at once think of all the

asthmatic and gouty old patriarchs he has ever heard of, and be

comforted. You need not be so cautious in speaking of the health of rich

and remote relatives, if he is in the line of succession.

Some shrewd old doctors have a few phrases always on hand for patients

that will insist on knowing the pathology of their complaints without the

slightest capacity of understanding the scientific explanation. I have

known the term "spinal irritation" serve well on such occasions, but I

think nothing on the whole has covered so much ground, and meant so

little, and given such profound satisfaction to all parties, as the

magnificent phrase "congestion of the portal system."

Once more, let me recommend you, as far as possible, to keep your doubts

to yourself, and give the patient the benefit of your decision.

Firmness, gentle firmness, is absolutely necessary in this and certain

other relations. Mr. Rarey with Cruiser, Richard with Lady Ann, Pinel

with his crazy people, show what steady nerves can do with the most

intractable of animals, the most irresistible of despots, and the most

unmanageable of invalids.

If you cannot acquire and keep the confidence of your patient, it is time

for you to give place to some other practitioner who can. If you are

wise and diligent, you can establish relations with the best of them

which they will find it very hard to break. But, if they wish to employ

another person, who, as they think, knows more than you do, do not take

it as a personal wrong. A patient believes another man can save his

life, can restore him to health, which, as he thinks, you have not the

skill to do. No matter whether the patient is right or wrong, it is a

great impertinence to think you have any property in him. Your estimate

of your own ability is not the question, it is what the patient thinks of

it. All your wisdom is to him like the lady's virtue in Raleigh's song:

"If she seem not chaste to me,

What care I how chaste she be?"

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician,

sticks to him till he dies. But there are many very good people who are

not what I call good patients. I was once requested to call on a lady

suffering from nervous and other symptoms. It came out in the

preliminary conversational skirmish, half medical, half social, that I

was the twenty-sixth member of the faculty into whose arms,

professionally speaking, she had successively thrown herself. Not being

a believer in such a rapid rotation of scientific crops, I gently

deposited the burden, commending it to the care of number twenty-seven,

and, him, whoever he might be, to the care of Heaven.

If there happened to be among my audience any person who wished to know

on what principles the patient should choose his physician, I should give

him these few precepts to think over:

Choose a man who is personally agreeable, for a daily visit from an

intelligent, amiable, pleasant, sympathetic person will cost you no more

than one from a sloven or a boor, and his presence will do more for you

than any prescription the other will order.

Let him be a man of recognized good sense in other matters, and the

chance is that he will be sensible as a practitioner.

Let him be a man who stands well with his professional brethren, whom

they approve as honest, able, courteous.

Let him be one whose patients are willing to die in his hands, not one

whom they go to for trifles, and leave as soon as they are in danger, and

who can say, therefore, that he never loses a patient.

Do not leave the ranks of what is called the regular profession, unless

you wish to go farther and fare worse, for you may be assured that its

members recognize no principle which hinders their accepting any remedial

agent proved to be useful, no matter from what quarter it comes. The

difficulty is that the stragglers, organized under fantastic names in

pretentious associations, or lurking in solitary dens behind doors left

ajar, make no real contributions to the art of healing. When they bring

forward a remedial agent like chloral, like the bromide of potassium,

like ether, used as an anesthetic, they will find no difficulty in

procuring its recognition.

Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions of

that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary

depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in

the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people

who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who have

mistaken their calling. You can do little with persons who are disposed

to accept these curious medical superstitions. The saturation-point of

individual minds with reference to evidence, and especially medical

evidence, differs, and must always continue to differ, very widely.

There are those whose minds are satisfied with the decillionth dilution

of a scientific proof. No wonder they believe in the efficacy of a

similar attenuation of bryony or pulsatilla. You have no fulcrum you can

rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly

endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but commonly

richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning faculties.

Let me return once more to the young graduate. Your relations to your

professional brethren may be a source of lifelong happiness and growth in

knowledge and character, or they may make you wretched and end by leaving

you isolated from those who should be your friends and counsellors. The

life of a physician becomes ignoble when he suffers himself to feed on

petty jealousies and sours his temper in perpetual quarrels. You will be

liable to meet an uncomfortable man here and there in the

profession,--one who is so fond of being in hot water that it is a wonder

all the albumen in his body is not coagulated. There are common barrators

among doctors as there are among lawyers,--stirrers up of strife under

one pretext and another, but in reality because they like it. They are

their own worst enemies, and do themselves a mischief each time they

assail their neighbors. In my student days I remember a good deal of

this Donnybrook-Fair style of quarrelling, more especially in Paris,

where some of the noted surgeons were always at loggerheads, and in one

of our lively Western cities. Soon after I had set up an office, I had a

trifling experience which may serve to point a moral in this direction.

I had placed a lamp behind the glass in the entry to indicate to the

passer-by where relief from all curable infirmities was to be sought and

found. Its brilliancy attracted the attention of a devious youth, who

dashed his fist through the glass and upset my modest luminary. All he

got by his vivacious assault was that he left portions of integument from

his knuckles upon the glass, had a lame hand, was very easily identified,

and had to pay the glazier's bill. The moral is that, if the brilliancy

of another's reputation excites your belligerent instincts, it is not

worth your while to strike at it, without calculating which of you is

likely to suffer most, if you do.

You may be assured that when an ill-conditioned neighbor is always

complaining of a bad taste in his mouth and an evil atmosphere about him,

there is something wrong about his own secretions. In such cases there

is an alterative regimen of remarkable efficacy: it is a starvation-diet

of letting alone. The great majority of the profession are peacefully

inclined. Their pursuits are eminently humanizing, and they look with

disgust on the personalities which intrude themselves into the placid

domain of an art whose province it is to heal and not to wound.

The intercourse of teacher and student in a large school is necessarily

limited, but it should be, and, so far as my experience goes, it is,

eminently cordial and kindly. You will leave with regret, and hold in

tender remembrance, those who have taken you by the hand at your entrance

on your chosen path, and led you patiently and faithfully, until the

great gates at its end have swung upon their hinges, and the world lies

open before you. That venerable oath to which I have before referred

bound the student to regard his instructor in the light of a parent, to

treat his children like brothers, to succor him in his day of need. I

trust the spirit of the oath of Hippocrates is not dead in the hearts of

the students of to-day. They will remember with gratitude every earnest

effort, every encouraging word, which has helped them in their difficult

and laborious career of study. The names they read on their diplomas

will recall faces that are like family-portraits in their memory, and the

echo of voices they have listened to so long will linger in their

memories far into the still evening of their lives.

One voice will be heard no more which has been familiar to many among

you. It is not for me, a stranger to these scenes, to speak his eulogy.

I have no right to sadden this hour by dwelling on the deep regrets of

friendship, or to bid the bitter tears of sorrow flow afresh. Yet I

cannot help remembering what a void the death of such a practitioner as

your late instructor must leave in the wide circle of those who leaned

upon his counsel and assistance in their hour of need, in a community

where he was so widely known and esteemed, in a school where he bore so

important a part. There is no exemption from the common doom for him who

holds the shield to protect others. The student is called from his

bench, the professor from his chair, the practitioner in his busiest

period hears a knock more peremptory than any patient's midnight summons,

and goes on that unreturning visit which admits of no excuse, and suffers

no delay. The call of such a man away from us is the bereavement of a

great family. Nor can we help regretting the loss for him of a bright

and cheerful earthly future; for the old age of a physician is one of the

happiest periods of his life. He is loved and cherished for what he has

been, and even in the decline of his faculties there are occasions when

his experience is still appealed to, and his trembling hands are looked

to with renewing hope and trust, as being yet able to stay the arm of the

destroyer.

But if there is so much left for age, how beautiful, how inspiring is the

hope of youth! I see among those whom I count as listeners one by whose

side I have sat as a fellow-teacher, and by whose instructions I have

felt myself not too old to profit. As we borrowed him from your city, I

must take this opportunity of telling you that his zeal, intelligence,

and admirable faculty as an instructor were heartily and universally

recognized among us. We return him, as we trust, uninjured, to the

fellow-citizens who have the privilege of claiming him as their own.

And now, gentlemen of the graduating class, nothing remains but for me to

bid you, in the name of those for whom I am commissioned and privileged

to speak, farewell as students, and welcome as practitioners. I

pronounce the two benedictions in the same breath, as the late king's

demise and the new king's accession are proclaimed by the same voice at

the same moment. You would hardly excuse me if I stooped to any meaner

dialect than the classical and familiar language of your prescriptions,

the same in which your title to the name of physician is, if, like our

own institution, you follow the ancient usage, engraved upon your

diplomas.

Valete, JUVENES, artis medicae studiosi; valete, discipuli, valete,

filii!

Salvete, VIRI, artis medicae magister; Salvete amici; salvete fratres!

MEDICAL LIBRARIES.

[Dedicatory Address at the opening of the Medical Library in Boston,

December 3, 1878.]

It is my appointed task, my honorable privilege, this evening, to speak

of what has been done by others. No one can bring his tribute of words

into the presence of great deeds, or try with them to embellish the

memory of any inspiring achievement, without feeling and leaving with

others a sense of their insufficiency. So felt Alexander when he

compared even his adored Homer with the hero the poet had sung. So felt

Webster when he contrasted the phrases of rhetoric with the eloquence of

patriotism and of self-devotion. So felt Lincoln when on the field of

Gettysburg he spoke those immortal words which Pericles could not have

bettered, which Aristotle could not have criticised. So felt he who

wrote the epitaph of the builder of the dome which looks down on the

crosses and weathercocks that glitter over London.

We are not met upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious

achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference, selfishness,

faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as

matter,--inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every

building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling

thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us

understanding. But we have gathered within walls which bear testimony to

the self-sacrificing, persevering efforts of a few young men, to whom we

owe the origin and development of all that excites our admiration in this

completed enterprise; and I might consider my task as finished if I

contented myself with borrowing the last word of the architect's epitaph

and only saying, Look around you!

The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some detail,

what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874, when six

gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch to discuss

different projects for a medical library. In less than four years from

that time, by the liberality of associations and of individuals, this

collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five thousand pamphlets,

and of one hundred and twenty-five journals, regularly received,--all

worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,--has come into being under

our eyes. It has sprung up, as it were; in the night like a mushroom; it

stands before us in full daylight as lusty as an oak, and promising to

grow and flourish in the perennial freshness of an evergreen.

To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of books,

exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive medical

libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well adapted to its

present needs? We will not point out individually all those younger

members of the profession who have accomplished what their fathers and

elder brethren had attempted and partially achieved. We need not write

their names on these walls, after the fashion of those civic dignitaries

who immortalize themselves on tablets of marble and gates of iron. But

their contemporaries know them well, and their descendants will not

forget them,--the men who first met together, the men who have given

their time and their money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of

the strenuous agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to his

eyelids, until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable,

tenacious, irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested nor

let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If,

against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my

revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he was

urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently active and

triumphantly successful.

We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:

that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy regular

practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the Boston

Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University; the Treadwell

Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the collections of the two

societies, that for Medical Improvement and that for Medical Observation;

and more especially the ten thousand volumes relating to medicine

belonging to our noble public city library,--too many blossoms on the

tree of knowledge, perhaps, for the best fruit to ripen. But the

Massachusetts Medical Society now numbers nearly four hundred members in

the city of Boston. The time had arrived for a new and larger movement.

There was needed a place to which every respectable member of the medical

profession could obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all might

find the special information they were seeking; where the latest medical

intelligence should be spread out daily as the shipping news is posted on

the bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common pursuit

could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art; where the

whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge as the

apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments. This was what the

old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the profession, who

"Desired it long,

But died without the sight."

This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance

undertook to give us. And now such a library, such a reading-room, such

an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we be hold a

fact, plain before us. The medical profession of our city, and, let us

add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach with its iron

arms, is united as never before by the commune vinculum, the common bond

of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish interest. It breathes a new

air of awakened intelligence. It marches abreast of the other learned

professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable centralized

libraries; abreast of them, but not promising to be content with that

position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What dignifies a

province like a university? What illuminates a country like its

scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a library?

The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use for

all this book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir

Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,--meaning

medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham

himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at

least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in

reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books,

great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense

without erudition is better than a learned one without common sense, but

the thorough master of his profession must have learning added to his

natural gifts.

It is not necessary to maintain the direct practical utility of all kinds

of learning. Our shelves contain many books which only a certain class

of medical scholars will be likely to consult. There is a dead medical

literature, and there is a live one. The dead is not all ancient, the

live is not all modern. There is none, modern or ancient, which, if it

has no living value for the student, will not teach him something by its

autopsy. But it is with the live literature of his profession that the

medical practitioner is first of all concerned.

Now there has come a great change in our time over the form in which

living thought presents itself. The first printed books,--the

incunabula,--were inclosed in boards of solid oak, with brazen clasps and

corners; the boards by and by were replaced by pasteboard covered with

calf or sheepskin; then cloth came in and took the place of leather; then

the pasteboard was covered with paper instead of cloth; and at this day

the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly periodical in its flimsy

unsupported dress of paper, and the daily journal, naked as it came from

the womb of the press, hold the larger part of the fresh reading we live

upon. We must have the latest thought in its latest expression; the page

must be newly turned like the morning bannock; the pamphlet must be newly

opened like the ante-prandial oyster.

Thus a library, to meet the need of our time, must take, and must spread

out in a convenient form, a great array of periodicals. Our active

practitioners read these by preference over almost everything else. Our

specialists, more particularly, depend on the month's product, on the

yearly crop of new facts, new suggestions, new contrivances, as much as

the farmer on the annual yield of his acres. One of the first wants,

then, of the profession is supplied by our library in its great array of

periodicals from many lands, in many languages. Such a number of medical

periodicals no private library would have room for, no private person

would pay for, or flood his tables with if they were sent him for

nothing. These, I think, with the reports of medical societies and the

papers contributed to them, will form the most attractive part of our

accumulated medical treasures. They will be also one of our chief

expenses, for these journals must be bound in volumes and they require a

great amount of shelf-room; all this, in addition to the cost of

subscription for those which are not furnished us gratuitously.

It is true that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other things

being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the obvious reason

that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a series is drained

off into the standard works with which the intelligent practitioner is

supposed to be familiar. But no extended record of facts grows too old

to be useful, provided only that we have a ready and sure way of getting

at the particular fact or facts we are in search of.

And this leads me to speak of what I conceive to be one of the principal

tasks to be performed by the present and the coming generation of

scholars, not only in the medical, but in every department of knowledge.

I mean the formation of indexes, and more especially of indexes to

periodical literature.

This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who

have had occasion to follow out any special subject. I have a right to

speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of indexes in

some small measure for my own need. I had a very complete set of the

"American Journal of the Medical Sciences;" an entire set of the "North

American Review," and many volumes of the reprints of the three leading

British quarterlies. Of what use were they to me without general

indexes? I looked them all through carefully and made classified lists

of all the articles I thought I should most care to read. But they soon

outgrew my lists. The "North American Review" kept filling up shelf

after shelf, rich in articles which I often wanted to consult, but what a

labor to find them, until the index of Mr. Gushing, published a few

months since, made the contents of these hundred and twenty volumes as

easily accessible as the words in a dictionary! I had a, copy of good

Dr. Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia, a treasure-house to my boyhood which has

not lost its value for me in later years. But where to look for what I

wanted? I wished to know, for instance, what Dr. Burney had to say about

singing. Who would have looked for it under the Italian word cantare? I

was curious to learn something of the etchings of Rembrandt, and where

should I find it but under the head "Low Countries, Engravers of

the,"--an elaborate and most valuable article of a hundred

double-columned close-printed quarto pages, to which no reference, even,

is made under the title Rembrandt.

There was nothing to be done, if I wanted to know where that which I

specially cared for was to be found in my Rees's Cyclopaedia, but to look

over every page of its forty-one quarto volumes and make out a brief list

of matters of interest which I could not find by their titles, and this I

did, at no small expense of time and trouble.

Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the

attention which has been given of late years to the great work of

indexing. It is a quarter of a century since Mr. Poole published his

"Index to Periodical Literature," which it is much to be hoped is soon to

appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions by

the additions of so long a period. The "British and Foreign Medical

Review," edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley,

Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men

of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its aid

I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon. The last edition

of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" had a complete index in a separate

volume, and the publishers of Appletons' "American Cyclopaedia" have

recently issued an index to their useful work, which must greatly add to

its value. I have already referred to the index to the "North American

Review," which to an American, and especially to a New Englander, is the

most interesting and most valuable addition of its kind to our literary

apparatus since the publication of Mr. Allibone's "Dictionary of

Authors." I might almost dare to parody Mr. Webster's words in speaking

of Hamilton, to describe what Mr. Gushing did for the solemn rows of back

volumes of our honored old Review which had been long fossilizing on our

shelves: "He touched the dead corpse of the 'North American,' and it

sprang to its feet." A library of the best thought of the best American

scholars during the greater portion of the century was brought to light

by the work of the indexmaker as truly as were the Assyrian tablets by

the labors of Layard.

A great portion of the best writing and reading literary, scientific,

professional, miscellaneous--comes to us now, at stated intervals, in

paper covers. The writer appears, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves. As

soon as he has delivered his message the book-binder puts a coat on his

back, and he joins the forlorn brotherhood of "back volumes," than which,

so long as they are unindexed, nothing can be more exasperating. Who

wants a lock without a key, a ship without a rudder, a binnacle without a

compass, a check without a signature, a greenback without a goldback

behind it?

I have referred chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include with

these the reports of medical associations, and those separate

publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves into

chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking up a great

deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and mousing

antiquarians, or possibly at long intervals some terebrating specialist.

Arranged, bound, indexed, all these at once become accessible and

valuable. I will take the first instance which happens to suggest

itself. How many who know all about osteoblasts and the experiments of

Ollier, and all that has grown out of them, know where to go for a paper

by the late Dr. A. L. Peirson of Salem, published in the year 1840, under

the modest title, Remarks on Fractures? And if any practitioner who has

to deal with broken bones does not know that most excellent and practical

essay, it is a great pity, for it answers very numerous questions which

will be sure to suggest themselves to the surgeon and the patient as no

one of the recent treatises, on my own shelves, at least, can do.

But if indexing is the special need of our time in medical literature, as

in every department of knowledge, it must be remembered that it is not

only an immense labor, but one that never ends. It requires, therefore,

the cooperation of a large number of individuals to do the work, and a

large amount of money to pay for making its results public through the

press. When it is remembered that the catalogue of the library of the

British Museum is contained in nearly three thousand large folios of

manuscript, and not all its books are yet included, the task of indexing

any considerable branch of science or literature looks as if it were well

nigh impossible. But many hands make light work. An "Index Society" has

been formed in England, already numbering about one hundred and seventy

members. It aims at "supplying thorough indexes to valuable works and

collections which have hitherto lacked them; at issuing indexes to the

literature of special subjects; and at gathering materials for a general

reference index." This society has published a little treatise setting

forth the history and the art of indexing, which I trust is in the hands

of some of our members, if not upon our shelves.

Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our own

country, as we have already seen. The need of it in the department of

medicine is beginning to be clearly felt. Our library has already an

admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of a number of its

younger members cooperating in the task. A very intelligent medical

student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by

well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a

yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the

United States, classified by authors and subjects. But it is from the

National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise and

the largest expectations. That great and growing collection of fifty

thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows books

and how to manage them. For libraries are the standing armies of

civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can organize

and marshal it so as to make it effective. The "Specimen Fasciculus of a

Catalogue of the National Medical Library," prepared under the direction

of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited the admiration of

Haller, the master scholar in medical science of the last century, or

rather of the profession in all centuries, and if carried out as it is

begun will be to the nineteenth all and more than all that the three

Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and Medicinae-Practicae--were to the

eighteenth century. I cannot forget the story that Agassiz was so fond

of telling of the king of Prussia and Fichte. It was after the

humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by Napoleon that the monarch

asked the philosopher what could be done to regain the lost position of

the nation. "Found a great university, Sire," was the answer, and so it

was that in the year 1810 the world-renowned University of Berlin came

into being. I believe that we in this country can do better than found a

national university, whose professors shall be nominated in caucuses, go

in and out, perhaps, like postmasters, with every change of

administration, and deal with science in the face of their constituency

as the courtier did with time when his sovereign asked him what o'clock

it was: "Whatever hour your majesty pleases." But when we have a noble

library like that at Washington, and a librarian of exceptional

qualifications like the gentleman who now holds that office, I believe

that a liberal appropriation by Congress to carry out a conscientious

work for the advancement of sound knowledge and the bettering of human

conditions, like this which Dr. Billings has so well begun, would redound

greatly to the honor of the nation. It ought to be willing to be at some

charge to make its treasures useful to its citizens, and, for its own

sake, especially to that class which has charge of health, public and

private. This country abounds in what are called "self-made men," and is

justly proud of many whom it thus designates. In one sense no man is

self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community. In another

sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on legs is

self-made. But if we award his just praise to the man who has attained

any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others

whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed

into undervaluing the mechanic's careful training to his business, the

thorough and laborious education of the scholar and the professional man.

Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flippant loquacity of half

knowledge. We must accept whatever good can be got out of it, and keep

it under as we do sorrel and mullein and witchgrass, by enriching the

soil, and sowing good seed in plenty; by good teaching and good books,

rather than by wasting our time in talking against it. Half knowledge

dreads nothing but whole knowledge.

I have spoken of the importance and the predominance of periodical

literature, and have attempted to do justice to its value. But the

almost exclusive reading of it is not without its dangers. The journals

contain much that is crude and unsound; the presumption; it might be

maintained, is against their novelties, unless they come from observers

of established credit. Yet I have known a practitioner,--perhaps more

than one,--who was as much under the dominant influence of the last

article he had read in his favorite medical journal as a milliner under

the sway of the last fashion-plate. The difference between green and

seasoned knowledge is very great, and such practitioners never hold long

enough to any of their knowledge to have it get seasoned.

It is needless to say, then, that all the substantial and permanent

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!