reforms was to
act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simply
prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage from
druggists. This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt the
style of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as
offensive criticism by his professional brethren. But Lydgate meant to
innovate in his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that the
best security for his practising honestly according to his belief was
to get rid of systematic temptations to the contrary.

Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than
the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when
America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he
were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark
territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young
adventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards
enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession. The more
he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the
nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that
fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the
century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of
Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like another
Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs. That great
Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,
fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be
understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;
but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues,
out of which the various organs--brain, heart, lungs, and so on--are
compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in
various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,
each material having its peculiar composition and proportions. No man,
one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its
parts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the
nature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat,
with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on
medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim,
oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of
structure which must be taken into account in considerin