ian students exhumed the body of an "elegans scortum," or lovely dame
of ill repute, the favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who
does not seem to have resisted temptation so well as the founder of
his order. We have always ranked the physician Rabelais among the early
reformers, but I do not know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his
hit at the morals of the religious orders, or for turning to the good of
science what was intended for the "benefit of clergy."

Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Servetus, the spiritual patient
to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire surface for
the cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating Harvey. The same
quickened thought of the time which led him to dispute the dogma of the
Church, opened his mind to the facts which contradicted the dogmas of
the Faculty.

Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan
period. Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient. The founder
of the new inductive philosophy had only been dead two years when the
treatise on the Circulation, the first-fruit of the Restoration of
Science, was given to the world.

And is it to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that while
Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was revolutionizing
the science of life and the art that is based upon it; that while the
young general was scaling the Alps, the young surgeon was climbing
the steeper summits of unexplored nature; that the same year read the
announcement of those admirable "Researches on Life and Death," and the
bulletins of the battle of Marengo?

If we come to our own country, who can fail to recognize that Benjamin
Rush, the most conspicuous of American physicians, was the intellectual
offspring of the movement which produced the Revolution? "The same
hand," says one of his biographers, "which subscribed the declaration
of the political independence of these States, accomplished their
emancipation from medical systems formed in foreign countries, and
wholly unsuitable to the state of diseases in America."

Following this general course of remark, I propose to indicate in a few
words the direction of the main intellectual current of the time, and
to point out more particularly some of the eddies which tend to keep the
science and art of medicine from moving with it, or even to carry them
backwards.

The two dominant words of our time are law and average, both pointing to