king of that gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham,
instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary for
his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development
until it became entirely separated from that of divinity. The spiritual
guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into the
secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of duties; but the healer
of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of God in nature,
as he sees their miracles with his own eyes. No doctrine of prayer or
special providence is to be his excuse for not looking straight at
secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience justifies him,
as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be.
While pious men were praying--humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to
their knowledge--over the endless succession of little children dying of
spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some
holes in the walls of the ward, let God's blessed air in on the little
creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it was
soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand lives of
these infant heirs of immortality. [Collins's Midwifery, p. 312.
Published by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was
granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications. Still, the habit of
dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and another
way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which knowledge
and way of thought are special means granted by Providence, and to be
thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying, so
often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo
athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists."

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very commonly, if
not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of ecclesiastical
commerce. The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he spoke those
memorable words, which you may read over the professor's chair in the
French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le guarit," "I dressed
his wound, and God healed it,"--is a different being from the God that
scholastic theologians have projected from their consciousness, or shaped
eve