She has been repeatedly subjected to the taxis; but no one ever examined the os uteri with the speculum until to-day. Well, that examination reveals a certain state of the cervix and os uteri, and glands of Naboth, &c., which it was indispensable to know, in order to found a rational treatment. The delicacy existed, not on the part of the lady, but on that of the medical advisers; for I have her assurance, that her sufferings, both bodily and mental, have been so great, that she should long ago have submitted to any means of even a probable cure; and was, indeed, always desirous to have everything done that was possible in her behalf. I doubt not this lady might have been cured long ago, had her malady been thoroughly understood.

I have mentioned this case to show that the physician is in fault when he does not do his whole duty; for it is incumbent on him to leave nothing undone that may aid and comfort his patient. But let us return to our remarks upon the qualities that ought to distinguish the medical man.

I think that, in order to be a physician, one ought to enjoy strong perceptive faculties; he should be able to make nice discriminations; quickly perceiving the slightest shades of difference in all material forms, superficies, colours, weights, and resistance. The faculty of judging between the relations and differences of things should be of the primest quality; not sudden, hasty, and impatient in its operations, but slow, dispassionate, and attentive.

The mind and heart of the practitioner ought to be the shrine of truth and probity; his mind should not deceive itself, and his heart should not suffer itself to be deceived and misled, by any earthly temptation, from the narrow and rugged way of duty and conscientiousness.

His intelligence ought to be vast, as acquainted, very generally, with what is called knowledge and science by mankind. Particularly should he be fully informed as to the nature of the Lifeforce, as displayed in the various tissues and organs of any animal economy; not in that of man alone, but in the whole zoological series, as well as in the vegetable kingdom of nature.

There ought to be no function of the economy, or of its parts, whose healthy rate he could not estimate, as well as all its deviations in sickness. But this is not all-he ought to be able to discern, not the signs only of maladies, but the tendencies of these maladies; as whether they possess a certain tendency

towards recovery, or a tendency towards destruction; so as to enable him to say, as he does of a vaccine inoculation, let it alone, it requires no remedy, it carries the cure in its own nature, it will have disappeared, with all its phenomena, on the eighteenth day. Or, on the other hand, take care of that headache; she is pregnant, and near term; know that such a headache is but a step removed from an eclampsia; and that an eclampsia is often the penultimate phenomenon of life. Let that case alone— cure this one.

Do you not perceive, young gentlemen, that such a physician is not of necessity a doser, a druggist; and that in a great moiety of the cases in which he is consulted, the patient will escape all physic and be cured by wise counsel-and likewise, that when therapeutical interference is required, he will know what to do, what medicines are required, and when, and how much?

It is often dangerous to ask a physician the question, what shall we do? because habit, custom, routinism, almost always compel him to say take-take.

He ought to be familiar with the doctrines of a good Medical School; by which I mean, not the doctrines of the University of Pennsylvania, or that of New York, or Maryland, or London, or Paris, nor the Jefferson College, but a school which has taught him a demonstrative anatomy, a real eclectic physiology, a sound and philosophical chemistry, &c. A school, in short, which has set before him, in full array, the results of man's achievements in medical investigation, experience, and art; leaving him, out of his own clear, sound, honest, and capacious intellect, to become capable of saying, as to any case of disorder presented for his opinion, such is the malady, its tendencies are thus, or so, its treatment requires such and such methods. Let him judge the case by the case, and by no other law or evidence.

Let him not be a methodist-let him be a man of principles in medicine; principles, which, like the genii of the Persian fable, come at his bidding and do his bidding, for no one can be taught to cure diseases by a method. Method in medicine is beneath contempt; because, owing to the infinite variety and differences existing among the living molecules that are the subjects of the vital forces, there never were, nor can be, two absolutely similar Each instance is an integer, and should, in strictness, be so deemed, and studied, and understood, and managed upon a

cases.

reference to it, and not to another integer. It is true that the patient who is under care to-day, may be like "him who died o' Wednesday," but is not him. Hence, you perceive that I am no admirer of statistics except for the government, where statistical returns of agriculture, commerce, manufactures, crime, population, &c., are useful to the statesman for making his assessments, his calculations, and his levies; but when I treat a case of pleurisy, I do not care how you treated your case of pleurisy; I shall bleed my patient on account of his fever, pain, cough, dyspnœa, &c., and not because you bled your patient, who had similar symptoms, of the gravity of which I am no judge, not having been present to judge. So, if I treat a female with certain pain about the middle of the sacral bone, with dysuria, or retention of urine, &c., by methods calculated to take the strain off from her ligamenta rotunda, and thus cure her of retroversio uteri, what is it to me that you adopted some other mode? That which interests me is, to be sure that a woman, who has ligamenta rotunda not more than two inches and a half long, cannot have her womb turned topsy-turvy. That is the principle which I ought to apprehend, and I shall carry it out in my practice. Do you get some other principle, if you can, and come to prove my error by your statistics; I should be strongly inclined to take after Mr. Dennis Bulgruddery, in the play, who, if bothered with statistics by his friend Bull, would have been sure to say, "To the divil I pitch you and your statistics, Mr. Bull!"

Let a man, therefore, make himself so thoroughly learned in medicine that he can detect the lesion of structure or function wherever it may hide, and then he is the sole judge of the action required in the case. Not because twenty other cases were, but because this case is.

But I stated that one great cause of unsuccess, is in the absence of information among the population generally. This absence of information is the fruitful source of Homœopathy, Hydropathy, Thompsonianism, Panaceaism, and all the Catholicons, Infallible worm destroying lozenges, Balms of Gilead, and that shocking absurdity-the Vegetable pill, which, like a sort of epidemic diarrhoea, has tormented the intestinal canal of thousands and tens of thousands of our far-seeing compatriots, until the American population have become hardened in purgations. If Horace were

here, he would not think the dura messorum ilia the toughest things in creation.

Do you suppose, my dear young gentlemen, that if the community at large should be as well acquainted with physiology and therapeutics as you and I, the Ledger and the Gazette would occupy nearly one-half of their columns with those horrid descriptions and unblushing confessions of piles and itch, and other dreadful disorders, which the sufferers under them love to parade for the public gratification and improvement, under their own signs manual in the Gazette?

You, who know the skeleton humanum, and the attitude of the uterus within the pelvis, do you think that Mrs. A. to X. would, out of a missionary zeal, suffer her name to appear as one of the wonder-worked cures of a shameless procidentia, by what is, at our daily breakfast-table, brought up in the morning paper, to stare the ladies out of countenance, under the modest title of a utero-abdominal supporter. Who wants to know, or ought to know that the ladies have abdomens and wombs but us doctors? When I was young a woman had no legs even, but only feet, and possibly ankles; now, forsooth, they have utero-abdominal supporters, not in fact only, but in the very newspapers. They are, surely, not fit subjects for newspaper advertisements, nor would they be advertised but out of our own stupidity or remissness.

I say, confidently, out of our remissness, and here are my reasons for saying so.

This is a land and an age of common schools and common sense. This is a country of general knowledge among the population. It is impossible that any system of science or art can stand in this country, flooded as it is with intellectual light, sustained by any but real claims to the respect and confidence of the public. We doctors claim this confidence and respect; and we deserve it, doubtless; but we claim it imperiously and as a vested right, as a right descended to us by inheritance, from our avos et proavos, the founders of our order. But we ought to remember that our privileges, those we received in a commission proceeding from the Legislature, under the Great Seal of the Commonwealth, are not of the nature of the privilegium clericale, as the lawyers term it. There are too many persons in this country that can read and write, to allow us to claim a clergyable exemption from the general practice here of explaining one's self. What is the right,

therefore, by which we assume, in the present day, to clothe all our proceedings in mystery, and to expect our patients to kneel down while we, (not confess, but) cut them with bistouries and knives, or put arsenic and prussic acid down their gullets? They will not submit to our clerical manners; and they say, that if we persist to hide our art under an impenetrable veil of mystery and jargon, they must continue incapable of discriminating betwixt the true physician and the quack-salver, since both agree upon one course, that of demanding an implicit faith and obedience without recourse to reasoning. Is not this representation a fair one? Even your early and noviciate experience must, we think, have furnished you the materials for judging whether I speak fairly or not.

I say then, it is our stupidity and remissness that work evil to the people, and redound to our own hurt also; for there is no person, endowed with a good share of common sense, to whom you could not address, through that common sense, a reasonable and plain statement of the facts of his case, the probabilities as to its course, duration, and end; with an enumeration of the safest, most convenient, and certain processes for its cure. Imagine such a person, well-informed, and you have the idea of a patient the most docile, the most exact in therapeutic and hygienic obedience; the most confiding in your skill, and the most grateful for your intervention in his behalf. Would that all our brethren in this land might adopt views like these. With their united force of intellect, of character, of beneficence, and of social station, it would be but a short time e'er the diminished head of charlatanism, under whatever disguise, would be found only to lift itself up among the most ignorant and abject portions of the population, instead of riding, as it does to-day, with chariots and with horsemen, a shame to the intelligence of the age, and a perpetual eye-sore to the lover of truth, and contemner of every species of imposture. Let us explain ourselves then to the people.

I hope it will not be deemed impertinent in me to say to you, that I have enjoyed a large share of professional business for some years past, and that, in the main, I have had reason to suppose I received very unbounded confidence, and a general obedience to my medical directions, from those persons and families who called me. This good fortune I have long attributed, in a