de, chiefly an art. This is implied in
Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease and
individualize the patient."

The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in
distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we
know about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of
sickness. We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its
fruit; we eat the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its
root. Nothing but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato
ball and cook the tomato. So of most of our remedies. The subchloride
of mercury, calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of
mercury, corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could
have told us it would be so.

From observations like these we can obtain certain principles from which
we can argue deductively to facts of a like nature, but the process
is limited, and we are suspicious of all reasoning in that direction
applied to the processes of healthy and diseased life. We are
continually appealing to special facts. We are willing to give Liebig's
artificial milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the child
anxiously whose wet-nurse is a chemist's pipkin. A pair of substantial
mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most
learned Professor's brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid
for infants.

The bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching. Certain
branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily
involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future
practitioner. But the over ambitious and active student must not be led
away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal
pursuit. The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of
knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a
very slender provision of science, in distinction from practical skill,
he may be a useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the
health of the community is intrusted.

To those who are not to engage in practice, the various pursuits
of science hardly require to be commended. Only they must not be
disappointed if they find many subjects treated in our courses as a
medical class requires, rather than as a scientific class would expect,
that is, with special limitations and constant reference to practical
ends. Fortunately they are