BY J. B. BITTINGER.

whose father was Time himself. This is but putting the chronology of medicine into poetry,

The following discourse was delivered at the late Com-to show how venerable in years, and how honmencement of the Western Reserve Medical College, Cleveland, Ohio. The author is a scholar, and a wit, who writes

like a divine.

orable in descent, it is. It is as old as pain. Pain was the first instructor in medicine, and the instinct of self-preservation the first physician. Man has a body, a soul, and sometimes a The first man that tied up a sore finger, or little property; and being overmuch inclined hung his wounded arm in a sling, practised to do wrong, he needs doctors, clergymen, and medicine. The first mother whose maternal lawyers. A physician to have the cure of his love made her assiduous to relieve her child, body, a priest for the cure of his soul, and a laid the foundation of Therapeutics. From lawyer to cure his estate. Thus sin gives us these small beginnings which instinct, selfdoctors of medicine, doctors of divinity, and love, or benevolence made, it has grown into doctors of law. These are the learned pro- the splendid science of modern Medicine, a fessions. Which is the most learned, I can- science which has rendered tributary to itself, not tell-but for some reason or other, medi- the virtue which lies concealed in every other cal men are all called" doctor," as soon as science. It has but one question,- - will this graduated, while D. D.'s and LL. D.'s come remove pain? With this kind interrogatory, only with gray hairs and many years, or many it accompanies the chemist into his laboratory, friends. and watches patiently his retorts and crucibles, But if sin has made the professions learned, to see whether a specific will not distil from it too has made them old. They came out of his alembic. With this inquiry, it goes a-simthe ark with Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and if pling with the botanist, over every hill, by they did not exist in Eden, it was because every running stream, and through all dewy fields-if, perchance, in some curiously carved chalice, it may find "a drop of comfort" for the invalid lying at home. With these words, brought also "loss of Eden." They have it inquires of the springs, which are attempertheir origin in man's necessities, and as man ed of God, in the bowels of the earth, for a is always, and everywhere, a needy creature, draught to drink to its patient's health. With the types of the three professions are found the same benevolent words, it interrogates the among all nations, and in all ages. We put heavens for stellar or other virtues, and knowin this claim for physicians in a special sense, ing that even brutes may be the depositories for though the clergyman was as soon needed of healing powers, the physician does not hesi as the doctor, he was not, judging from mod- tate to ask counsel of the broad-faced lowing ern history, as soon wanted. Medicine, too, kine. Medicine having to do with all "the is older than law, for I suppose men took sick thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," before they went to law, if not, it was very its votaries have been an accredited fraternity in all communities. While Plato considered Medicine dates back to the morning of life, it a disgrace that a city should have physicians the shadows of a hoary antiquity gather about and rulers, he was compelled to admit both its cradle. The annals of history do not reach into his model republic. The "New Atlantis," back of it, but only open the portals of fable, of Bacon, had its dispensatories, and doubtless in whose shadowy domain it is supposed to its doctors too; and even More's Utopia was dwell. Esculapius was grandson of Jupiter, not considered perfect without hospitals. As

"the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,"

soon after.

guarding us against the danger coming like a and not wash. In a word, you must diffuse a demon out of the dark, even this blessing, knowledge of the principles of Hygiene: eat"Many have done well, but thou excellest ing and drinking; clothing and bathing; venthem all." Again, he who from the murder- tilation, working, and recreation. The study ous melee of a railway collision, collects the of epidemic constitutions belongs here, and quivering fragments, and again binds them to that complicated branch of your science, known gether in their former "bundle of life," does as medical topography. These, added to a good thing; but he who shall put a signal on pathology and physiology, are some of the these great sagenes tearing through the land things which go to fit the physician for his like howling Abaddons, and prevent the fatal second great duty-preventing disease. fray to which they are rushing,- this man, we The history of our race proves that disease say, does a great deal better. These nobler has abridged life; suffering has made our days men that look to the future, are they who pre- like the patriarch's, not only evil, but few; vent, rather than cure. These are they that therefore, the third duty of the physician is to "make broad their phylacteries," but unlike prolong our days and perfect our life. The the Jewish doctors, incur no curse, but con- life loom into which death weaves our days trariwise a blessing.

with such rapid and reckless stroke, the phyIf to heal skilfully, you must know all the sician must set to a more even tenor, that windings of the labyrinth of disease, and be in the texture of life may be both better in qualleague with every secret of pharmacy; to pre- ity, and more in quantity. The physician of vent disease you must know its every haunt the soul, while curing present maladies and and covert, to warn unwary feet against ap- preventing future sins, seeks the perfection of proach. One of your profession has said that the spirit; so the physician of the body, purg"most people kill themselves." Now, it is the ing its present ills, and guarding against the duty of physicians to tell men so, and to tell future, should seek to lengthen nature's lease. them how they do it. One man does it with Lord Bacon, in commending his "History powder and ball, another with powders and of Life and Death" to the reader, expresses pills. Cassius had " a lean and hungry look"- the hope " that the nobler sort of physicians because he thought too much. Our streets will advance their thoughts, and not employ are full of men shadowy " as that spare their time wholly in the sordidness of cures, Cassius." These men embalm themselves neither be honored for necessity only; but against the day of their burial. There is much that they will become coadjutors and instru meaning in the expressions, "dead and gone," ments of the divine omnipotence and clem"dead and buried." Men die of lobelia in- ency, in prolonging and renewing the life of flata long before they go off with consumption. man." What has already been said under the Many a man who has died of "the milk of second head will satisfy us that life has its Venus," is buried with disease of the heart, economics. Some men live out only half their and he whom Venus slew, goes with the next days, the other half, being mortgaged to excholera season. How many die of doing cess, imprudence, and ignorance, are forfeited. nothing; you should tell them that "ennui" By exorbitancy, they "wooed the remorseis as fatal as corrosive sublimate. The miser less sisters to wind down the watch of life, and looks into his gold bags till he grows sallow. to break them off before the hour." Why not tell him that this rich complexion Now, when the physician has mapped out will be "the death of him?" Tell those infected districts and put them under quaran hemming, hacking, home-bodies, who for all tine, when he has popularized the principles of the fresh air they get, might as well live in a Hygiene, and given them time to percolate bag like Terence's miser, that unless they take through incumbent strata of prejudice, and off the embargo and go for free trade, they settle into habits and customs of action, then will die of home consumption. And that the race will have begun the journey of longer dirty wretch who should honestly sweat every life. This will be the beginning of the distwenty-four hours, 6 lbs. 4 oz. 6 dr., and who covery of the elixir. Then the ichor of the shrinks from water as from poison, let him gods will be once more put into man's veins, know that his hydrophobia will be fatal to him, and a new vitality stimulate his forces. This, unless he takes to soap and warm water, and therefore, is the true idea of the physicianthat right speedily. If" cleanliness is next to to cure the curable, to prevent the preventagodliness," such men would better turn Mo- ble, and to perfect the perfectible. To restore hammedan and wash, than remain Christians man as near as possible to his physical state in

Paradise; to disinfect him of the breath and food of Parmentier and Rumford, the proper smell of pain; to retouch the immortal linen- treatment of the insane by Pinel, and the inments of his body, and to place him again on telligent sympathy of John Howard? But his forfeited pedestal,—this, and nothing less, the discovery of Jenner as a preventive of is the true mission of the true physician. variola, rises like a vision of life in our dying That this meridian sun should not be be- world. It seems like a fiat of the Creator. yond the aim of your purpose, will become Annually it turns back the shadow of death more evident by studying the accomplishments ten degrees, on half a million of dials, not to of past aims. Physicians, you will say, cannot mention that an equal number escape its maligabolish death-no, but they can postpone its nant finger prints. Is not vaccination a spark coming. They cannot abolish pain-no, but of that" wisdom, in whose right hand is length they can soothe it. The physician cannot pre- of days?" vent the sailor from breaking his skull by a In private hygiene there have been equally fall from the mast-head- - no, but he can raise great advances. The experience of thirty the depressed bone, and make all the sailor's years daily weighing is recorded in Sanctorius' remaining days, days of consciousness. Let" Aphorisms of Static Medicine." Cheney not the physician look too much within for and Cornaro, both invalids from excess, were doubts, but without for facts. In the hos- reinstated by dieting: the former attaining to pitals of Paris, where fifty years ago fourteen seventy-two, the latter one hundred years. In died in every one hundred admitted, now only his old age the Venetian nobleman tells us very eight die, a gain of six to the one hundred; naively, he was able to go through a severe i. e., if Cleveland with her 50,000 had passed law-suit, of the effects of which his brother through those hospitals in 1805, she would died. What a vivid conception this gives us have lost 7000 persons-passing through in of the advantage which Cornaro's 12 oz. of 1855, she would lose only 4,000. In 1805, solids and 14 oz. of fluids daily, as a hygienic one syphilitic patient died in fifty-six, now one proceeding, had over the semi-monthly vomitin two hundred and ninety-four. In midwifery ings which were orthodox in Hippocrates' day. practice, one hundred and fifty years ago, one In our day, we choose our time to have the in forty died, now hardly one in two hundred small-pox, as we do to see any other unweland fifty. The average increase of life in come visitor. The surgery of Hippocrates and France, from 1776 to 1842, was fifty-two days Celsus makes one faint in the reading, but now, per annum; i. e., if the same ratio obtains in while with anesthetic agents the invalid "lies our city as in France, medical science would down to pleasant dreams," the surgeon repairs have added during the year to our 50,000 citi- or takes off an arm or a leg. Still men taunt zens, fifty-two days each, making in the aggre- the profession with the ancient and musty odor gate more than 7000 years. Does this not of its Latin prescriptions, but the ball and chain look as if the wheel of life had been turned of precedents hangs to the leg of all the proback, as if science had wrestled with the an-fessions. Cato reduced luxations by incantagel of death and prevailed? tion-we think we have improved on that, yet Another view. From 1476 to 1649, the crude as are the censor's precepts, we prefer plague prevailed sixteen times at Marseilles. his commentaries to Cæsar's, since any curing In 1619 the first Lazaretto was established, is better than any killing. But what if phyand from 1649 to the present time, it has pre-sicians do not always cure? If John Toland vailed only once in the city, though frequently had been cured, we should never have known in its Lazaretto. Since the one established first his hypocrisy. Montaigne's epigrams would at Marseilles, the entire commercial world has not have been half so pointed if lithotomy had been, as it were, inoculated, and the pestilence then been known, and possibly Montaigne's kept in quarantine. The lightning is not more epigrams are worth more to posterity than his securely ruled by the iron rod, than is this health would have been. In anatomy the proscourge of God held in check by the secret of gress is not less marked than in Hygiene. Two the Coptic monks. Who can count up the hundred years after Christ, it took a whole book years gained, and the joys accumulated, and from the pen of Galen, to satisfy the profesthe griefs assuaged in cities and camps, in ships sion, that the arterics were full of blood, inand barracks, prisons and workshops, cottage stead of air. For more than a thousand years and country, by ventilation and drainage un- after, no anatomist looked beneath the human der medical direction: by the disinfecting skin. It was a sacred covering, protected by agents of Guyton-Morveau, the pure, cheap the superstition of the people and the bulls of