has had two or three lessons which have a deep meaning to those
who are willing to read them honestly. The use of water-dressings in
surgery completed the series of reforms by which was abolished the
"coarse and cruel practice" of the older surgeons, who with their
dressings and acrid balsams, their tents and leaden tubes, "absolutely
delayed the cure." The doctrine of Broussais, transient as was its
empire, reversed the practice of half of Christendom for a season, and
taught its hasty disciples to shun their old favorite remedies as mortal
poisons. This was not enough permanently to shift the presumption about
drugs where it belonged, and so at last, just as the sympathetic powder
and the Unguentum Armarium came in a superstitious age to kill out the
abuses of external over-medication, the solemn farce of Homoeopathy was
enacted in the face of our own too credulous civilization, that under
shelter of its pretences the "inward bruises" of over-drugged viscera
might be allowed to heal by the first intention. Its lesson we must
accept, whether we will or not; its follies we are tired of talking
about. The security of the medical profession against this and all
similar fancies is in the average constitution of the human mind with
regard to the laws of evidence.

My friends and brothers in Art! There is nothing to be feared from the
utterance of any seeming heresy to which you may have listened. I cannot
compromise your collective wisdom. If I have strained the truth one
hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis, you are
accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment, and know
full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and the nervous
palpitations of rhetoric.

The freedom with which each of us speaks his thought in this presence,
belongs in part to the assured position of the Profession in our
Commonwealth, to the attitude of Science, which is always fearless, and
to the genius of the soil on which we stand, from which Nature withheld
the fatal gift of malaria only to fill it with exhalations that breed the
fever of inquiry in our blood and in our brain. But mainly we owe the
large license of speech we enjoy to those influences and privileges
common to us all as self-governing Americans.

This Republic is the chosen home of minorities, of the less power in the
presence of the greater. It is a common error to speak of our
distinction as consisting in the rule of the majority. Ma