covery of the circulation, and how Spigelius made the
liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a monument more enduring
than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and the kidney.

But after all, the readers who care most for the early records of medical
science and art are the specialists who are dividing up the practice of
medicine and surgery as they were parcelled out, according to Herodotus,
by the Egyptians. For them nothing is too old, nothing is too new, for
to their books of all others is applicable the saying of D'Alembert that
the author kills himself in lengthening out what the reader kills himself
in trying to shorten.

There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never
grow old. Would you know how to recognize "male hysteria" and to treat
it, take down your Sydenham; would you read the experience of a physician
who was himself the subject of asthma, and who, notwithstanding that, in
the words of Dr. Johnson, "panted on till ninety," you will find it in
the venerable treatise of Sir John Floyer; would you listen to the story
of the King's Evil cured by the royal touch, as told by a famous
chirurgeon who fully believed in it, go to Wiseman; would you get at
first hand the description of the spinal disease which long bore his
name, do not be startled if I tell you to go to Pott,--to Percival Pott,
the great surgeon of the last century.

There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted by
somebody. It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated
physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical
education to know if I had the works of Sanctorius, which he had tried in
vain to find. I could have lent him the "Medicina Statica," with its
frontispiece showing Sanctorius with his dinner on the table before him,
in his balanced chair which sunk with him below the level of his
banquet-board when he had swallowed a certain number of ounces,--an early
foreshadowing of Pettenkofer's chamber and quantitative physiology,--but
the "Opera Omnia" of Sanctorius I had never met with, and I fear he had
to do without it.

I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works which
we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale of
medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling with a
disrespectful name. Such has always been my own practice. I have
welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as Dioscor