urvivors, the widowed husbands, and the motherless
children, as well as "the unfortunate accoucheur."

CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE

An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the
Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860.

"Facultate magis quam violentia."
HIPPOCRATES.

Our Annual Meeting never fails to teach us at least one lesson. The art
whose province it is to heal and to save cannot protect its own ranks
from the inroads of disease and the waste of the Destroyer.

Seventeen of our associates have been taken from us since our last
Anniversary. Most of them followed their calling in the villages or
towns that lie among the hills or along the inland streams. Only those
who have lived the kindly, mutually dependent life of the country, can
tell how near the physician who is the main reliance in sickness of all
the families throughout a thinly settled region comes to the hearts of
the people among whom he labors, how they value him while living, how
they cherish his memory when dead. For these friends of ours who have
gone before, there is now no more toil; they start from their slumbers
no more at the cry of pain; they sally forth no more into the storms;
they ride no longer over the lonely roads that knew them so well; their
wheels are rusting on their axles or rolling with other burdens; their
watchful eyes are closed to all the sorrows they lived to soothe. Not
one of these was famous in the great world; some were almost unknown
beyond their own immediate circle. But they have left behind them that
loving remembrance which is better than fame, and if their epitaphs are
chiselled briefly in stone, they are written at full length on living
tablets in a thousand homes to which they carried their ever-welcome aid
and sympathy.

One whom we have lost, very widely known and honored, was a leading
practitioner of this city. His image can hardly be dimmed in your
recollection, as he stood before you only three years ago, filling the
same place with which I am now honored. To speak of him at all worthily,
would be to write the history of professional success, won without
special aid at starting, by toil, patience, good sense, pure character,
and pleasing manners; won in a straight uphill ascent, without one
breathing-space until he sat down, not to rest, but to die. If prayers
could have shielded him from the stroke, if love could have drawn forth
the weap