to discover what organic elements are
deficient or in excess in a case of chronic disease, and the best way of
correcting the abnormal condition, just as an agriculturist ascertains
the wants of his crops and modifies the composition of his soil. In
acute febrile diseases we have long ago discovered that far above all
drug-medication is the use of mild liquid diet in the period of
excitement, and of stimulant and nutritious food in that of exhaustion.
Hippocrates himself was as particular about his barley-ptisan as any
Florence Nightingale of our time could be.

The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession,
belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction
of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that
makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians?
His prescriptions consisted principally of simples. An aperient or an
opiate, a "cardiac" or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of a
somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. It was not by his
pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name. It was by
daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horseback
for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and the noxious and
often loathsome rubbish of the established schools. Of course Sydenham
was much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to
remind his reader. "I must needs conclude," he says, "either that I am
void of merit, or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are
formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to
gratitude, make a very small part of the whole." If in the fearless
pursuit of truth you should find the world as ungracious in the
nineteenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a
lesson of self-reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious
physician: "'T is none of my business to inquire what other persons
think, but to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no
favor of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper."

The physician has learned a great deal from the surgeon, who is naturally
in advance of him, because he has a better opportunity of seeing the
effects of his remedies. Let me shorten one of Ambroise Pare's stories
for you. There had been a great victory at the pass of Susa, and they
were riding into the city. The wounded cried out as the horses trampled
them