d up in this country by the
remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited Diseases,
which has, I believe, done more than any other work or essay in our own
language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery to the
drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of the profession.

Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in
the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one of the
attending physicians,--yes, Louis did a great work for practical
medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of
authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any
student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend,
and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel
that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and
study.

There is one part of their business which certain medical practitioners
are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to
do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or
at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest
to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter cubic inches
of his lung are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of the
curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy,--whether this
or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form of
degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the
anguish of dyspnea, to bring back motion and sensibility to the dead
limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What is it to him that you can
localize and name by some uncouth term the disease which you could not
prevent and which you cannot cure? An old woman who knows how to make a
poultice and how to put it on, and does it tuto, eito, jucunde, just when
and where it is wanted, is better,--a thousand times better in many
cases,--than a staring pathologist, who explores and thumps and doubts
and guesses, and tells his patient be will be better tomorrow, and so
goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis.

But in those days, I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much
more of "science" than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not
clung so closely to the skirts of Louis and had followed some of the
courses of men like Trousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special attention
to curati