rse
casts a shoe, do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe him
until I have made sure that he is sound on the distinction between the
sesquioxide and the protosesquioxide of iron?"

--But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the
next generation, or in some possible remote future.--

"Diavolo!" as your Dr. Rabelais has it,--answers the iconoclast,--"what
is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury? I pay the Captain of
the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to Liverpool, not
to make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers! If Professor Peirce
undertakes to pilot me into Boston Harbor and runs me on Cohasset rocks,
what answer is it to tell me that he is Superintendent of the Coast
Survey? No, Sir! I want a plain man in a pea-jacket and a sou'wester,
who knows the channel of Boston Harbor, and the rocks of Boston Harbor,
and the distinguished Professor is quite of my mind as to the matter,
for I took the pains to ask him before I ventured to use his name in the
way of illustration."

I do not know how the remarks of the image-breaker may strike others,
but I feel that they put me on my defence with regard to much of my
teaching. Some years ago I ventured to show in an introductory Lecture
how very small a proportion of the anatomical facts taught in a regular
course, as delivered by myself and others, had any practical bearing
whatever on the treatment of disease. How can I, how can any medical
teacher justify himself in teaching anything that is not like to be of
practical use to a class of young men who are to hold in their hands
the balance in which life and death, ease and anguish, happiness and
wretchedness are to be daily weighed?

I hope we are not all wrong. Oftentimes in finding how sadly ignorant
of really essential and vital facts and rules were some of those whom
we had been larding with the choicest scraps of science, I have doubted
whether the old one-man system of teaching, when the one man was of the
right sort, did not turn out better working physicians than our more
elaborate method. The best practitioner I ever knew was mainly shaped
to excellence in that way. I can understand perfectly the regrets of my
friend Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, for the good that was lost with the
old apprenticeship system. I understand as well Dr. Latham's fear "that
many men of the best abilities and good education will be deterred from
prosecuting physic as a p