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tion, I admit the existence of this theory, but in the face of truth, I deny the necessity for it, or the wisdom of it. In thus bending to the sordid gravitation of the earth, there is a deformity in our art which, except in Egypt, when she was sinking, has seen no light until the last thirty or forty fleeting years. In these years, the Esculapian, forgetting his nobler part, has degraded himself to a common level, when he might have stood, in the earnest consciousness of his strength, above the level, and a first power in the land. Where, at the present time in this country, and in physic, is to be found the type of Richard Mead, who, in his palace, where little children now pour forth their touching woes, could command the friendship of every illustrious man who visited our shores? Where is now the Physician who dare say to the Prime Minister of England, liberate a just and upright man from the durance of the political prison, or my skill is in safe keeping from your frailty? Where is the representative of Haller, who shall claim, and claim to win, an equal place with the princes of philosophy? Where are the great teachers of Leyden, Padua, and London? Where are the men, who, like Harvey and Lower, in days when differences of rank were far more keenly appreciated than now, could call royal pupils to their noble demonstrations? Alas! I know not. I know only of a profession sinking fast its art into its trade, and in some, and many instances, descending even to the speculative tricks of the gambler, and to their inevitable consequences, loss of wealth, loss of mental health, and unmitigated despair.

Facilis descensus Averni, and never so facile as when the great descend.

That some one, if not I, should speak thus earnestly against the centrifugal rending of medicine, is the more necessary because of the risks of delay. It cannot be concealed that one generation imbued with a particular conceit, if it retain it to the last, passes it to the next generation with

increasing force, and that many, indeed all, of the deepest sectional delusions have their root in the idola of descended usages and forms. A false belief, thus seated, evolves a practice of overwhelming power, because, despite the most cogent reasons against it, suggested and proved by better knowledge, men are afraid to question it or leave it. Thus, our forefathers in physic, by their too rigid adherence to wholesale blood-letting, against reason, allowed even the meanest of their enemies to prove them wrong with such a vengeance that in the revulsion of thought right and wrong fell together, and a grand remedy, in its true place, was as suddenly as childishly condemned and cast aside.

Amongst some classes of men, the retention of a prejudice engrafted of old, and belonging to many generations, may be of service, in that it may ensure the praise and confidence of a world able to judge of the merits of a mere idea or sentiment. Of the priest, the barrister, or the politician, the world may have a standard of judgment, and that judgment may have soundness in it, resting upon a correct understanding of a necessity or a talent. But of us, out of our moral and social relations, the world has no standard that is worth its possession or our appreciation. Our licenses to heal are its only safeguards, and these are governed by our own laws and opinions. In our practice we hear ourselves offensively criticised to-day, and to-morrow as offensively lauded; but by those of us who are serious in our work, the praise and blame are measured alike, because we know that our self-conscious mistakes are as often falsely admired as our self-conscious triumphs are falsely misrespresented. Who of us, that is observant, does not constantly witness the conceit that the last physician called in to give an opinion is the best in the eyes of the looker-on? Yet, who of us, that is honest, does not feel that the conceit is absurd, and, by common understanding, treat it for precisely what it is worth and no more?

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But for these very reasons, for the reason of the helplessness of the world in judging of us, and the security of our own isolated position, we ought to guard the more jealously the unity of our science, and endeavour to become, not many men treading diverse paths, and aping before universal ignorance superiorities which we cannot substantiate before ourselves, but as one man treading the same path, and striving for such union of power as shall make all who will the best in all places, and in all time. Above everything, we ought not to permit a future Le Clerc, Sprengel, or Freind, to say of us, that in an age, crowded with every advantage, we forgot Hippocrates, and, bitten by the practices of inferior minds, turned our Temple into a market-place, each man with his own stall, and no stall with anything upon it the historian cares to discover.

By what steps shall we then progress towards that unity to which it is essential to aspire, towards that high standard of producing and fruitful research which shall put our work among the philosophies, and give us command and power. Proceeding to answer this question from its negative side, let me at once express an entire disbelief of the utility of spending time in putting down what is called quackery. Of course I do not mean that men who cultivate scientific medicine should associate with men of quackish mind and instinct, or that it is bad for us to do as we usually do, scent out with uncommon sharpness, all such representatives of the rat and weasel type, and send them to perpetual Coventry, with such marks on them as shall fix their positions and characters too firmly to admit of mistake. But I mean that it is in vain to enter into waste of controversy with systematised quackery, because, if we can make our science pure, there could be no quackery in existence, while there will be quackery so long as the science is impure. We see that in astronomy there are no quacks, that amongst skilled artisans there are no quacks;

and, turning to our own world, we know that even with us some parts of our field are entirely free of quacks. Who can find me a quack anatomist? Mark! as surgery has become

more precise, how in surgery the quack has slunk aside. Where now is the quack woman who would venture, as in the time of good old Daniel Turner, to plunge a needle into the eye-ball to extract opaque bodies from its chambers. These errors have passed away, and so shall all quackeries pass as the certain takes the place of the doubtful or obscure. Respecting blatant quackery out of our sphere, I think we have every reason to be satisfied with its rapid decline; it has virtually ceased as a distinct and recognised trade, and in that character needs no more punishment. In our ranks, though it hides still, and, I veritably believe, exists often of necessity in the natural constitution of those who exhibit it, in men of small brain and cold blood, it is growing more harmless, day by day, under the influence of exposure, and its own idiotic feebleness.

Leaving then the negative side of the question, let us consider in what way our lines of research shall so be carried out that our united forces shall be brought into full and combined action.

And first, it appears to me, that such weakness as we show lies amongst those of us who represent the actual living fact of physic-lies in this, that we are walking separated from each other, on lines divergent so that we cannot meet, and so broadly apart that we do not even hail each other. We are as rays of light entering transparency, and yet not combining to form a focus, making no picture of such definition that the world can see a design in our combined action. If this be so, then the first step in our research must come from the active members of the profession, and must show itself by a resolution to arrest the present centrifugal aberration, to concentrate the forces, to consolidate the bases of our science.

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