down to us of the first century of medical practice,
in the hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and
reasonable. I suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which
the colonists found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out
of them, as the exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians
and surgeons in the late war. Good food and enough of it, pure air
and water, cleanliness, good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate,
a stimulant, quinine, and two or three common drugs, proved to be the
marrow of medical treatment; and the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went
the way of embroidered shirts and white kid gloves and malacca joints,
in their time of need. "Good wine is the best cordiall for her," said
Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to Samuel Symonds, speaking of that
gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham, instead of physic, once ordered a
roast chicken and a pint of canary for his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development
until it became entirely separated from that of divinity. The spiritual
guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into
the secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of duties; but the
healer of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of God
in nature, as he sees their miracles with his own eyes. No doctrine
of prayer or special providence is to be his excuse for not looking
straight at secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience
justifies him, as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity
fabled him to be. While pious men were praying--humbly, sincerely,
rightly, according to their knowledge--over the endless succession
of little children dying of spasms in the great Dublin Hospital, a
sagacious physician knocked some holes in the walls of the ward, let
God's blessed air in on the little creatures, and so had already saved
in that single hospital, as it was soberly calculated thirty years ago,
more than sixteen thousand lives of these infant heirs of immortality.
[Collins's Midwifery, p. 312. Published by order of the Massachusetts
Medical Society. Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician was
granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications. Still, the habit
of dealing with things seen generates another kind of knowledge, and
another way of thought, from that of dealing with things unseen; which
knowledge