art, and the quickened life of the time in which he lived.
It was not the state to favor sound, calm observation. He was impatient,
and Nature is profoundly imperturbable. We may adjust the beating of our
hearts to her pendulum if we will and can, but we may be very sure that
she will not change the pendulum's rate of going because our hearts are
palpitating. He thought he had mastered yellow-fever. "Thank God," he
said, "out of one hundred patients whom I have visited or prescribed for
this day, I have lost none." Where was all his legacy of knowledge when
Norfolk was decimated? Where was it when the blue flies were buzzing
over the coffins of the unburied dead piled up in the cemetery of New
Orleans, at the edge of the huge trenches yawning to receive them?

One such instance will do as well as twenty. Dr. Rush must have been a
charming teacher, as he was an admirable man. He was observing, rather
than a sound observer; eminently observing, curious, even, about all
manner of things. But he could not help feeling as if Nature had been a
good deal shaken by the Declaration of Independence, and that American
art was getting to be rather too much for her,--especially as illustrated
in his own practice. He taught thousands of American students, he gave a
direction to the medical mind of the country more than any other one man;
perhaps he typifies it better than any other. It has clearly tended to
extravagance in remedies and trust in remedies, as in everything else.
How could a people which has a revolution once in four years, which has
contrived the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which has chewed the juice
out of all the superlatives in the language in Fourth of July orations,
and so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of abuse that it takes two
great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand; which insists in sending
out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail, out-run, out-fight, and
checkmate all the rest of creation; how could such a people be content
with any but "heroic" practice? What wonder that the stars and stripes
wave over doses of ninety grains of sulphate of quinine, [More strictly,
ninety-six grains in two hours. Dunglison's Practice, 1842, vol. ii. p.
520. Eighty grains in one dose. Ibid. p. 536. Ninety-six grains of
sulphate of quinine are equal to eight ounces of good bark.--Wood &
Bache.] and that the American eagle screams with delight to see three
drachms of calomel given at a single mouthful?

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