study for which
his genius fits him when he once feels that he has become master of his
chosen art.

I know that many branches of science are of the greatest value as feeders
of our medical reservoirs. But the practising physician's office is to
draw the healing waters, and while he gives his time to this labor he can
hardly be expected to explore all the sources that spread themselves over
the wide domain of science. The traveller who would not drink of the
Nile until he had tracked it to its parent lakes, would be like to die of
thirst; and the medical practitioner who would not use the results of
many laborers in other departments without sharing their special toils,
would find life far too short and art immeasurably too long.

We owe much to Chemistry, one of the most captivating as well as
important of studies; but the medical man must as a general rule content
himself with a clear view of its principles and a limited acquaintance
with its facts; such especially as are pertinent to his pursuits. I am
in little danger of underrating Anatomy or Physiology; but as each of
these branches splits up into specialties, any one of which may take up a
scientific life-time, I would have them taught with a certain judgment
and reserve, so that they shall not crowd the more immediately practical
branches. So of all the other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of
knowledge, I would have them strictly subordinated to that particular
kind of knowledge for which the community looks to its medical advisers.

A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as
medicine itself is a science. On the natural history side, medicine is a
science; on the curative side, chiefly an art. This is implied in
Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease and
individualize the patient."

The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in
distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we know
about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of sickness.
We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its fruit; we eat
the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its root. Nothing
but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato ball and cook
the tomato. So of most of our remedies. The subchloride of mercury,
calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of mercury,
corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could have told