stemper," and regarded by many as
the same as our "diphtheria." Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general use
of mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of their
employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have proved
specially useful.

At some time in the course of this century medical practice had settled
down on four remedies as its chief reliance. I must repeat an incident
which I have related in another of these Essays. When Dr. Holyoke,
nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James Jackson as his
student, he showed him the formidable array of bottles, jars, and
drawers around his office, and then named the four remedies referred to
as being of more importance than all the rest put together. These were
"Mercury, Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian Bark." I doubt if either of
them remembered that, nearly seventy years before, in 1730, Dr.
William Douglass, the disputatious Scotchman, mentioned those same four
remedies, in the dedication of his quarrelsome essay on inoculation, as
the most important ones in the hands of the physicians of his time.

In the "Proceedings" of this Society for the year 1863 is a very
pleasant paper by the late Dr. Ephraim Eliot, giving an account of
the leading physicians of Boston during the last quarter of the last
century. The names of Lloyd, Gardiner, Welsh, Rand, Bulfinch, Danforth,
John Warren, Jeffries, are all famous in local history, and are
commemorated in our medical biographies. One of them, at least, appears
to have been more widely known, not only as one of the first aerial
voyagers, but as an explorer in the almost equally hazardous realm of
medical theory. Dr. John Jeffries, the first of that name, is considered
by Broussais as a leader of medical opinion in America, and so referred
to in his famous "Examen des Doctrines Medicales."

Two great movements took place in this eighteenth century, the effect of
which has been chiefly felt in our own time; namely, the establishment
of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the founding of the Medical
School of Harvard University.

The third century of our medical history began with the introduction of
the second great medical discovery of modern times,--of all time up to
that date, I may say,--once more via Boston, if we count the University
village as its suburb, and once more by one of our Massachusetts
physicians. In the month of July, 1800, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of
Cambridge submitted four of hi