actice of medicine is concerned; and this is by far
the most important thing to be learned, because it deals with so many
more lives than any other branch of the profession. So of personal
instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval of lectures,
much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory, some in the
microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it has many
advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not wish to see it
shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me long enough
already.

If I am jealous of the tendency to expand the time given to the
acquisition of curious knowledge, at the expense of the plain
old-fashioned bedside teachings, I only share the feeling which Sydenham
expressed two hundred years ago, using an image I have already borrowed.
"He would be no honest and successful pilot who was to apply himself with
less industry to avoid rocks and sands and bring his vessel safely home,
than to search into the causes of the ebbing and flowing of the sea,
which, though very well for a philosopher, is foreign to him whose
business it is to secure the ship. So neither will a physician, whose
province it is to cure diseases, be able to do so, though he be a person
of great genius, who bestows less time on the hidden and intricate method
of nature, and adapting his means thereto, than on curious and subtle
speculation."

"Medicine is my wife and Science is my mistress," said Dr. Rush. I do
not think that the breach of the seventh commandment can be shown to have
been of advantage to the legitimate owner of his affections. Read what
Dr. Elisha Bartlett says of him as a practitioner, or ask one of our own
honored ex-professors, who studied under him, whether Dr. Rush had ever
learned the meaning of that saying of Lord Bacon, that man is the
minister and interpreter of Nature, or whether he did not speak
habitually of Nature as an intruder in the sick room, from which his art
was to expel her as an incompetent and a meddler.

All a man's powers are not too much for such a profession as Medicine.
"He is a learned man," said old Parson Emmons of Franklin, "who
understands one subject, and he is a very learned man who understands two
subjects." Schonbein says he has been studying oxygen for thirty years.
Mitscherlich said it took fourteen years to establish a new fact in
chemistry. Aubrey says of Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation,
that "though all his pr