raits of your own special teachers scattered through various parts
of the land in the picture I have drawn. Let me assure you that whatever
you may learn in this or any other course of public lectures,--and I
trust you will learn a great deal,--the daily guidance, counsel, example,
of your medical father, for such the Oath of Hippocrates tells you to
consider your preceptor, will, if he is in any degree like him of whom I
have spoken, be the foundation on which all that we teach is reared, and
perhaps outlive most of our teachings, as in Dr. Jackson's memory the
last lessons that remained with him were those of his Old Master.

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS.

A Lecture of a Course by members of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
delivered before the Lowell Institute, January 29, 1869.

The medical history of eight generations, told in an hour, must be in
many parts a mere outline. The details I shall give will relate chiefly
to the first century. I shall only indicate the leading occurrences,
with the more prominent names of the two centuries which follow, and add
some considerations suggested by the facts which have been passed in
review.

A geographer who was asked to describe the tides of Massachusetts Bay,
would have to recognize the circumstance that they are a limited
manifestation of a great oceanic movement. To consider them apart from
this, would be to localize a planetary phenomenon, and to provincialize a
law of the universe. The art of healing in Massachusetts has shared more
or less fully and readily the movement which, with its periods of ebb and
flow, has been raising its level from age to age throughout the better
part of Christendom. Its practitioners brought with them much of the
knowledge and many of the errors of the Old World; they have always been
in communication with its wisdom and its folly; it is not without
interest to see how far the new conditions in which they found themselves
have been favorable or unfavorable to the growth of sound medical
knowledge and practice.

The state of medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and
country,--one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery
invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of
the age of stone,--a relic of which we may find in the practice of
Zipporah, the wife of Moses,--to the delicate operations of to-day upon
patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress