can influences which we are bound to
take cognizance of. If I wished to show a student the difficulties of
getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history
of epilepsy to read. If I wished him to understand the tendencies of the
American medical mind, its sanguine enterprise, its self-confidence, its
audacious handling of Nature, its impatience with her old-fashioned ways
of taking time to get a sick man well, I would make him read the life
and writings of Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush thought and said that there were
twenty times more intellect and a hundred times more knowledge in
the country in 1799 than before the Revolution. His own mind was in a
perpetual state of exaltation produced by the stirring scenes in which
he had taken a part, and the quickened life of the time in which he
lived. It was not the state to favor sound, calm observation. He was
impatient, and Nature is profoundly imperturbable. We may adjust the
beating of our hearts to her pendulum if we will and can, but we may be
very sure that she will not change the pendulum's rate of going because
our hearts are palpitating. He thought he had mastered yellow-fever.
"Thank God," he said, "out of one hundred patients whom I have visited
or prescribed for this day, I have lost none." Where was all his legacy
of knowledge when Norfolk was decimated? Where was it when the blue
flies were buzzing over the coffins of the unburied dead piled up in
the cemetery of New Orleans, at the edge of the huge trenches yawning to
receive them?

One such instance will do as well as twenty. Dr. Rush must have been a
charming teacher, as he was an admirable man. He was observing, rather
than a sound observer; eminently observing, curious, even, about all
manner of things. But he could not help feeling as if Nature had been a
good deal shaken by the Declaration of Independence, and that
American art was getting to be rather too much for her,--especially
as illustrated in his own practice. He taught thousands of American
students, he gave a direction to the medical mind of the country more
than any other one man; perhaps he typifies it better than any other. It
has clearly tended to extravagance in remedies and trust in remedies,
as in everything else. How could a people which has a revolution once in
four years, which has contrived the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which
has chewed the juice out of all the superlatives in the language in
Fourth of July oration