ed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker
in disease, but they believed that each malady could be successfully
attacked from some special part of the body,--the strategic point which
commanded the seat of the morbid affection. On a figure given in the
curious old work of John de Ketam, no less than thirty-eight separate
places are marked as the proper ones to bleed from, in different
diseases. Even Louis, who had not wholly given up venesection, used now
and then to order that a patient suffering from headache should be bled
in the foot, in preference to any other part.

But what Louis did was this: he showed by a strict analysis of numerous
cases that bleeding did not strangle,--jugulate was the word then
used,--acute diseases, more especially pneumonia. This was not a
reform,--it was a revolution. It was followed up in this country by the
remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited Diseases,
which has, I believe, done more than any other work or essay in our
own language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery to the
drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of the profession.

Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent
in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one
of the attending physicians,--yes, Louis did a great work for practical
medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of
authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any
student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend,
and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I
feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and
study.

There is one part of their business which certain medical practitioners
are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to
do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or
at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest
to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter cubic inches
of his lung are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of
the curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy,--whether
this or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that
form of degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to
mitigate the anguish of dyspnea, to bring back motion and sensibility
to the dead limb, to still the tortures of