on, and skill could have healed the wound, this passing tribute
might have been left to other lips and to another generation.

Let us hope that our dead have at last found that rest which neither
summer nor winter, nor day nor night, had granted to their unending
earthly labors! And let us remember that our duties to our brethren do
not cease when they become unable to share our toils, or leave behind
them in want and woe those whom their labor had supported. It is
honorable to the Profession that it has organized an Association a for
the relief of its suffering members and their families; it owes
this tribute to the ill-rewarded industry and sacrifices of its less
fortunate brothers who wear out health and life in the service of
humanity. I have great pleasure in referring to this excellent movement,
which gives our liberal profession a chance to show its liberality, and
serves to unite us all, the successful and those whom fortune has cast
down, in the bonds of a true brotherhood.

A medical man, as he goes about his daily business after twenty years of
practice, is apt to suppose that he treats his patients according to the
teachings of his experience. No doubt this is true to some extent; to
what extent depending much on the qualities of the individual. But it
is easy to prove that the prescriptions of even wise physicians are
very commonly founded on something quite different from experience.
Experience must be based on the permanent facts of nature. But a glance
at the prevalent modes of treatment of any two successive generations
will show that there is a changeable as well as a permanent element in
the art of healing; not merely changeable as diseases vary, or as new
remedies are introduced, but changeable by the going out of fashion of
special remedies, by the decadence of a popular theory from which their
fitness was deduced, or other cause not more significant. There is no
reason to suppose that the present time is essentially different in
this respect from any other. Much, therefore, which is now very commonly
considered to be the result of experience, will be recognized in the
next, or in some succeeding generation, as no such result at all, but as
a foregone conclusion, based on some prevalent belief or fashion of the
time.

There are, of course, in every calling, those who go about the work of
the day before them, doing it according to the rules of their craft, and
asking no questions of the past or of