his the great number of Medical Journals, all useful, we hope,
most of them necessary, we trust, many of them excellently well
conducted, but which must find something to fill their columns, and so
print all the new plans of treatment and new remedies they can get hold
of, as the newspapers, from a similar necessity, print the shocking
catastrophes and terrible murders.

Besides all this, here are we, the great body of teachers in the
numberless medical schools of the Union, some of us lecturing to crowds
who clap and stamp in the cities, some of us wandering over the country,
like other professional fertilizers, to fecundate the minds of less
demonstrative audiences at various scientific stations; all of us talking
habitually to those supposed to know less than ourselves, and loving to
claim as much for our art as we can, not to say for our own schools, and
possibly indirectly for our own practical skill. Hence that annual crop
of introductory lectures; the useful blossoming into the ornamental, as
the cabbage becomes glorified in the cauliflower; that lecture-room
literature of adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration, that splendid
show of erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited to Lord Bacon and
the rest, which have suggested to our friends of the Medical Journals an
occasional epigram at our expense. Hence the tendency in these
productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the efficacy
of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered for showy
talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of adjectives rather
than of nouns substantive in the more ambitious of these institutions.

Such are some of the eddies in which we are liable to become involved and
carried back out of the broad stream of philosophical, or, in other
words, truth-loving, investigations. The causes of disease, in the mean
time, have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search for
remedies. Speak softly! Women have been borne out from an old-world
hospital, two in one coffin, that the horrors of their prison-house might
not be known, while the very men who were discussing the treatment of the
disease were stupidly conveying the infection from bed to bed, as
rat-killers carry their poisons from one household to another. Do not
some of you remember that I have had to fight this private-pestilence
question against a scepticism which sneered in the face of a mass of
evidence such as the calm stati