better part of Christendom. Its practitioners brought with them much of
the knowledge and many of the errors of the Old World; they have always
been in communication with its wisdom and its folly; it is not
without interest to see how far the new conditions in which they found
themselves have been favorable or unfavorable to the growth of sound
medical knowledge and practice.

The state of medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and
country,--one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery
invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences
of the age of stone,--a relic of which we may find in the practice of
Zipporah, the wife of Moses,--to the delicate operations of to-day
upon patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which
presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of the workshop and
the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to accumulate. Before
the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia, or the quinine which
arrests the fit of an ague, can find their place in our pharmacies,
commerce must have perfected its machinery, and science must have
refined its processes, through periods only to be counted by the life of
nations. Before the means which nature and art have put in the hands of
the medical practitioner can be fairly brought into use, the prejudices
of the vulgar must be overcome, the intrusions of false philosophy must
be fenced out, and the partnership with the priesthood dissolved. All
this implies that freedom and activity of thought which belong only to
the most advanced conditions of society; and the progress towards this
is by gradations as significant of wide-spread changes, as are the
varying states of the barometer of far-extended conditions of the
atmosphere.

Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has a
meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to details
in themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record. A medical entry in
Governor Winthrop's journal may seem at first sight a mere curiosity;
but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief
as to the order of the universe and the relations between man and his
Maker. Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the
prevailing interpretation and treatment of disease. When the touch of
a profligate monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of
maladies, when the common symptoms of hyster