Bethlehem
should have been chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the
divine mercy, are all we can yet find room for.

The present century has seen the establishment of all those great
charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of the
mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as among the
chief ornaments of their civilization.

The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of
medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease)
and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies); but
their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored in
their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past, their
memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient old
dry-nurse, whose "blackdrop" is the never-failing anodyne of the restless
generations of men. Except the lively controversy on inoculation, and
floating papers in journals, we have not much of value for that long
period, in the shape of medical records.

But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to
mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find. Of
these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.

Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical School
of our University, did a great work for the advancement of medicine and
surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and author, greater, it
is claimed by some, than was ever done by any other man. The two
Warrens, of our time, each left a large and permanent record of a most
extended surgical practice. James Jackson not only educated a whole
generation by his lessons of wisdom, but bequeathed some of the most
valuable results of his experience to those who came after him, in a
series of letters singularly pleasant and kindly as well as instructive.
John Ware, keen and cautious, earnest and deliberate, wrote the two
remarkable essays which have identified his name, for all time, with two
important diseases, on which he has shed new light by his original
observations.

I must do violence to the modesty of the living by referring to the many
important contributions to medical science by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, and
especially to his discourse on "Self-limited Diseases," an address which
can be read in a single hour, but the influence of which will be f