M. Roux
and Baron Larrey. [Cooper's Surg. Diet. art. "Wounds." Yet Mr. John
Bell gives the French surgeons credit for introducing this doctrine of
adhesion, and accuses O'Halloran of "rudeness and ignorance," and "bold,
uncivil language," in disputing their teaching. Princ. of Surgery, vol.
i. p. 42. Mr. Hunter succeeded at last in naturalizing the doctrine and
practice, but even he had to struggle against the perpetual jealousy
of rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.] We have
often heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen. While
Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of
French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all the
wisdom is necessarily with us in both cases.

Our art has had two or three lessons which have a deep meaning to those
who are willing to read them honestly. The use of water-dressings in
surgery completed the series of reforms by which was abolished the
"coarse and cruel practice" of the older surgeons, who with their
dressings and acrid balsams, their tents and leaden tubes, "absolutely
delayed the cure." The doctrine of Broussais, transient as was its
empire, reversed the practice of half of Christendom for a season, and
taught its hasty disciples to shun their old favorite remedies as mortal
poisons. This was not enough permanently to shift the presumption about
drugs where it belonged, and so at last, just as the sympathetic powder
and the Unguentum Armarium came in a superstitious age to kill out the
abuses of external over-medication, the solemn farce of Homoeopathy was
enacted in the face of our own too credulous civilization, that under
shelter of its pretences the "inward bruises" of over-drugged viscera
might be allowed to heal by the first intention. Its lesson we must
accept, whether we will or not; its follies we are tired of talking
about. The security of the medical profession against this and all
similar fancies is in the average constitution of the human mind with
regard to the laws of evidence.

My friends and brothers in Art! There is nothing to be feared from the
utterance of any seeming heresy to which you may have listened. I cannot
compromise your collective wisdom. If I have strained the truth one
hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis, you are
accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment, and know
full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and the ner