sis. Yet I remember that the reverend
and venerable Dr. Prince of Salem told me one Commencement day, as I was
jogging along towards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the time
when that disease was hardly hardly known; and in confirmation of his
statement mentioned a case in which it was told as a great event, that
somebody down on "the Cape" had died of "a consumption." This story does
not sound probable to myself, as I repeat it, yet I assure you it is
true, and it shows how cautiously we must receive all popular stories of
great changes in the habits of disease.

Is there no progress, then, but do we return to the same beliefs and
practices which our forefathers wore out and threw away? I trust and
believe that there is a real progress. We may, for instance, return in a
measure to the Brunonian stimulating system, but it must be in a modified
way, for we cannot go back to the simple Brunonian pathology, since we
have learned too much of diseased action to accept its convenient
dualism. So of other doctrines, each new Avatar strips them of some of
their old pretensions, until they take their fitting place at last, if
they have any truth in them, or disappear, if they were mere phantasms of
the imagination.

In the mean time, while medical theories are coming in and going out,
there is a set of sensible men who are never run away with by them, but
practise their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same way from
generation to generation. From the time of Hippocrates to that of our
own medical patriarch, there has been an apostolic succession of wise and
good practitioners. If you will look at the first aphorism of the
ancient Master you will see that before all remedies he places the proper
conduct of the patient and his attendants, and the fit ordering of all
the conditions surrounding him. The class of practitioners I have
referred to have always been the most faithful in attending to these
points. No doubt they have sometimes prescribed unwisely, in compliance
with the prejudices of their time, but they have grown wiser as they have
grown older, and learned to trust more in nature and less in their plans
of interference. I believe common opinion confirms Sir James Clark's
observation to this effect.

The experience of the profession must, I think, run parallel with that of
the wisest of its individual members. Each time a plan of treatment or a
particular remedy comes up for trial, it is submitted to a