e, who regards the
cultivation of too much land as a great defect in our New England
farming. I hope that our Medical Institutions may never lay themselves
open to the kind of accusation Mr. Lowe brings against the English
Universities, when he says that their education is made up "of words that
few understand and most will shortly forget; of arts that can never be
used, if indeed they can even be learnt; of histories inapplicable to our
times; of languages dead and even mouldy; of grammatical rules that never
had living use and are only post mortem examinations; and of statements
fagoted with utter disregard of their comparative value."

This general thought will be kept in view throughout my somewhat
discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson
from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait
from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long
loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun my hour, you must
pardon me, for I can say with Pascal that I have not had the time to make
my lecture shorter.

In the year 1647, that good man John Eliot, commonly called the Apostle
Eliot, writing to Mr. Thomas Shepherd, the pious minister of Cambridge,
referring to the great need of medical instruction for the Indians, used
these words:

"I have thought in my heart that it were a singular good work, if the
Lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in England
to give some maintenance toward some Schoole or Collegiate exercise this
way, wherein there should be Anatomies and other instructions that way,
and where there might be some recompence given to any that should bring
in any vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of Physick.

"There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way,
namely that our young students in Physick may be trained up better then
they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to
fall to practise before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or duely trained
up in making experiments, for we never had but one Anatomy in the
countrey, which Mr. Giles Firman [Firmin] now in England, did make and
read upon very well, but no more of that now."

Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the hearts of
our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges where medicine is
taught in all its branches. Mr. Giles Firmin's "Anatomy" may be
considered the first ance