s, and so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of
abuse that it takes two great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand;
which insists in sending out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail,
out-run, out-fight, and checkmate all the rest of creation; how could
such a people be content with any but "heroic" practice? What wonder
that the stars and stripes wave over doses of ninety grains of sulphate
of quinine, [More strictly, ninety-six grains in two hours. Dunglison's
Practice, 1842, vol. ii. p. 520. Eighty grains in one dose. Ibid. p.
536. Ninety-six grains of sulphate of quinine are equal to eight ounces
of good bark.--Wood & Bache.] and that the American eagle screams with
delight to see three drachms of calomel given at a single mouthful?

Add to this the great number of Medical Journals, all useful, we
hope, most of them necessary, we trust, many of them excellently well
conducted, but which must find something to fill their columns, and so
print all the new plans of treatment and new remedies they can get hold
of, as the newspapers, from a similar necessity, print the shocking
catastrophes and terrible murders.

Besides all this, here are we, the great body of teachers in the
numberless medical schools of the Union, some of us lecturing to crowds
who clap and stamp in the cities, some of us wandering over the country,
like other professional fertilizers, to fecundate the minds of less
demonstrative audiences at various scientific stations; all of us
talking habitually to those supposed to know less than ourselves, and
loving to claim as much for our art as we can, not to say for our own
schools, and possibly indirectly for our own practical skill. Hence that
annual crop of introductory lectures; the useful blossoming into the
ornamental, as the cabbage becomes glorified in the cauliflower; that
lecture-room literature of adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration,
that splendid show of erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited
to Lord Bacon and the rest, which have suggested to our friends of
the Medical Journals an occasional epigram at our expense. Hence the
tendency in these productions, and in medical lectures generally,
to overstate the efficacy of favorite methods of cure, and hence the
premium offered for showy talkers rather than sagacious observers,
for the men of adjectives rather than of nouns substantive in the more
ambitious of these institutions.

Such are some of the eddies in which we are l