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, dyspnoea, &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

considerable measure, to the entire frankness of my explanations as to any diagnostic, prognostic, therapeutic, and hygienic views in my cases; as well as the pathology of them.

Some of the brethren, chiefly, I presume, those who have not very clear and concise views of their own on medical topics, are bitterly opposed to all explanation, on the ground that our principles of science are too recondite for the vulgar to be able to appreciate either them or the facts on which they rest. I have occasionally met with difficulties, in consultation, from the opposition of some of the brethren to my desire to let the patient fully into my opinions. If a man really have any opinions, that are honest and clear, and well founded, why should he conceal them? confess my belief, that where a physician forms perfectly transparent views of his cases, there is no need for the powdered wig and the gold-headed cane, the mysterious nod, and all the apparatus of deception that we might look for rather in old Felix Plater, or Horace Augenius, than in a modern physician, who is, or ought to be, a modern gentleman and man of honor; and, as such, above all false pretences-open, candid, and manly.

I

Now, I sincerely believe, that where you desire to effect a cure, and you meet with obstruction through the timidity, the doubts, or apprehensions of the patient, you will only have to speak common sense, and to take out your pencil, and, on a sheet of paper, make a few well sketched diagrams of parts, organs, and relations of parts and organs, in order to bring the recusant back to a truer and firmer faith than before, by convincing his judgment and winning his inclination. Yea, verily, you shall sustain the fainting hope and the dying faith of the sick girl, for days and for weeks, and through months of pain, if you speak the truth and explain the truth; if you show the hope and have the hope; if you explain the power and really possess it.

If you have not the confidence of your patients, it is because you either do not merit it by your science, your skill, and your temper; or because possessing all these, you are destitute of, what I beg you to excuse me for calling in a grave book by a slight term, gumption. Depend upon it, my dear young gentlemen, there are plenty of people, "plenty as blackberries," who are very learned and very shining, except when you come to rub them, and who lose all shining quality, because they have not and cannot take a real polish.

The celebrated Dr. Clarke, of London, from whose lectures that capital little midwifery book, called the London Practice of Midwifery, was pirated, says, somewhere in its pages, that one Doctor, by his good sense, shall retain the entire confidence of the woman in labor through the most painful protractedness, while another would lose her confidence, in a very short time, of hope deferred; and that, not because he hath not ability as a prescriber equal to the other, but from some fault of manner, expression, or conversation.

If you would be learned men, it is well; but it is better to be wise men. A man may be wise without being learned; but it is not uncommon to be learned, and yet to be a perfect ass in all that relates to what I might term administration, or action. Let your light, therefore, shine among men, and do not conceal it under a bushel of gawkeyness; or some stupid conceit of your personal dignity; or, what is still more asinine, the dignity of your calling. Dignity is you, not physic, nor the practice thereof. Did you never hear that

"Worth makes the man, the want of it the fellow,

And all the rest is leather and prunella?"

I have seen dignified shoemakers, carters, butchers, and even a very dignified tailor, and I have known philosophers and very learned men without dignity. Believe me, there is true dignity in great virtue, great information, and great power to diffuse, apply, and make that information useful to our fellow men. Such is the dignity you should strive to attain.

If I could give you the best piece of advice in my power, I think I should give you this advice; namely, in all your dealings with mankind as physicians, and in all your life-doings, strive, first, to increase the boundaries of your knowledge; and, second, strive to make that knowledge as vulgar, as popular as possible. Be a reformer in this particular, and you will, should you succeed, become the real founder of a Sect in medicine, and that sect you may baptize as the Young Physic that Dr. Forbes advocates. That will be the true young physic, which succeeds in bringing down Old Physic to the level of this common sense age.

I say again, therefore, wherever you place yourself, be sure to have no concealment, no mystery, no pretence; but endeavor, in the clearest manner, not to assert, but to show your claims to