get out my great
Albinus before every lecture on the muscles, nor disturb the majestic
repose of Vesalius every time I speak of the bones he has so admirably
described and figured. But it does please me to read the first
descriptions of parts to which the names of their discoverers or those
who have first described them have become so joined that not even modern
science can part them; to listen to the talk of my old volume as Willis
describes his circle and Fallopius his aqueduct and Varolius his bridge
and Eustachius his tube and Monro his foramen,--all so well known to
us in the human body; it does please me to know the very words in which
Winslow described the opening which bears his name, and Glisson his
capsule and De Graaf his vesicle; I am not content until I know in what
language Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation, and how
Spigelius made the liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a
monument more enduring than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and
the kidney.

But after all, the readers who care most for the early records of
medical science and art are the specialists who are dividing up the
practice of medicine and surgery as they were parcelled out, according
to Herodotus, by the Egyptians. For them nothing is too old, nothing is
too new, for to their books of all others is applicable the saying of
D'Alembert that the author kills himself in lengthening out what the
reader kills himself in trying to shorten.

There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never
grow old. Would you know how to recognize "male hysteria" and to
treat it, take down your Sydenham; would you read the experience of
a physician who was himself the subject of asthma, and who,
notwithstanding that, in the words of Dr. Johnson, "panted on till
ninety," you will find it in the venerable treatise of Sir John Floyer;
would you listen to the story of the King's Evil cured by the royal
touch, as told by a famous chirurgeon who fully believed in it, go
to Wiseman; would you get at first hand the description of the spinal
disease which long bore his name, do not be startled if I tell you to go
to Pott,--to Percival Pott, the great surgeon of the last century.

There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted
by somebody. It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated
physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical
education to know if I had the works of