THE MEDICAL 
Science and Profession. 
J + 
—BY TtlE -j/ 
KEY. IV. WEST, D. I >.. 
—BEFORE THE — 
TRUSTEES, FACULTY AND GRADUATING CLASS 
—OF THE— 
Miami Medical (lollimeoiufjyTT^ 
Delivered in Pike’s Opera House, Cincinnati, Ohio, 
FEBRUARY 27th, 1877. 
CINCINNATI: 
Cincinnati Lancet Press, Printers, 204 Vine St. 
1 8 77. THE MEDICAL 
Science and Profession. 
Joppfififll) mlfes 
—BY 
REV. TV. WEST, D. D., 
—BEFORE THE — 
> 
TRUSTEES, FACULTY AND GRADUATING CLASS 
—OF THE— 
dPiami ®edital (College, „ r 
Delivered in Pike’s Opera House, Cincinnati, Ohio, 
FEBRUARY 27th, 1877. 
CINCINNATI: 
Cincinnati Lancet Press, Printers, 204 Vine St. 
18 77. Miami Medical College, Cin’ti, March 6th, 1877. 
Rev. N. West, D. D. 
My Dear Sir: 
The Faculty of the Miami Medical College so highly appreciates 
your address at the late commencement, that it lias instructed me 
to ask you for a copy for publication. 
I am, 
Truly Yours, 
John A. Murphy, Dean. 
422 West 7th. St., Cincinnati, March 6th, 1877. 
J. A. Murphy, M. D., Dean of the Faculty of the Miami Medi- 
cal College. 
My Dear Sir: 
Your favor of yesterday, requesting, in behalf of the Miami 
Medical College which you represents copy of the address deliver- 
ed upon the occasion of the late Commencement, is received. With 
acknowledgments to the Faculty, I herewith put the manuscript 
at your disposal, and remain, 
Very Sincerely Yours, 
Nathaniel West. (lommeimiuMit JjJIrefp, 
by p. totpj, b. b. 
Mr. President, gentlemen of the faculty, and graduating class, and 
ladies and gentlemen: 
I speak, to-night, in praise of the medical profession; a tribute 
not less difficult to be adequately brought by any one outside 
the profession itself, than abundantly deserved by those whose cul- 
ture forbids the mention of their own merit: “ Let another praise 
thee and not thine own lips ” is an excellent rule, and we recog- 
nize as fully the justice of the permission it grants, as the pro- 
priety of the prohibition it enjoins. 
To the great mass of society the profession is known only as it 
comes in contact with some individual want, or alleviates some in- 
dividual distress. The popular conception of the “Healing Art” 
is, that the issues of life and death are in the physician’s hands, 
and that, unless he performs miracles of cure worthy of omnipo- 
tence and omniscience, his practice is, for the most part, a criminal 
trifling with the sanctity of human life. The best practitioners 
are often held responsible for results which the decrees of God 
and inviolable laws of nature necessitate, and no human skill can 
avert, and the conclusion is ignorantly reached by the many that, 
on the whole, the profession is an injury and not a benefit to man- 
kind. The sentiment is a reproach to the intelligence of all who 
entertain it, and is contradicted by the records of the world. 
Long ago, the line of Ovid : “Aon est in Medico semper relevetur 
ut ceger,”—the cure of the patient is not always in the physi- 
cian’s power—was an expression of universal experience, and our 2 
modern coplaints against the faculty are as little creditable to our 
good sense, as they are oblivious of the wonders the profession has 
wrought for the relief of mankind. 
Unless the histories of medicine are a pure invention, like the 
fables of ancient mythology, the science of medicine wears a crown 
to-day more brilliant than that which astronomy boasts, and rests 
on a basis more strong and enduring than the rock-ribbed founda- 
tions of Geology itself. Next to those who bore witness to the 
Christian truth, its heroes are among the foremost benefactors of 
the human race. The Egyptian Spliynx with its mystic face, the 
pyramids that skirt the Lybian shore, and the signal-tower of Babel, 
are young in comparison with this. Its date remounts to the gates 
of Eden, whence it arose with the science of religion itself, 
springing from the common ground of a moral catastrophe to 
which all subsequent catastrophes are due, the violation of that 
moral hygiene the sum of whose laws is the Divine will, and the 
transgression of which was the first historic cause of all human 
maladies and death itself. It is a profound fact—not matter of 
natural science I admit, but going beyond it, and resting on a 
divine testimony—that human sickness, disease, and death, are the 
result of “sin.” The natural possibility of human mortality was 
only incident to a perfect human creation. Its necessity, how- 
ever, was a judicial indiction for trangression of the laws of 
moral Hygiene, a contingency against which man might have vin- 
dicated bis title to perfect health of body and soul by persistence 
in moral obedience. The medical profession has its roots in that 
first catastrophe in which body and soul, alike, shared the effects of 
the disruption of that harmony which supervened upon the first 
human disobedience. Nor is it less wonderful that fundamental 
symptoms of disease and dying in the body are identical with those 
of the spirit—violent pain, feverish unrest, gloomy depression, 
waste, and abolition of normal functions, or that the signs of con- 
valescence in the one are analogues of the signs of convalescence 
in the other. The German scientists have noticed the profound 
inter-relation and correspondence between mental and bodily sick- 
ness, and mental and bodily recovery, denominating the vital 
disturbance in both cases an “afr-leben,” or living down, a pro- 
gressive decay, the other an “aaf-leben,” or living-up, a progress- 
ive restoration. It demonstrates the intimate connection between 
Physiology and Psychology, and the reciprocal Pathology, if I 3 
may so say, of both. If any one therefore, will seek the true occa- 
sion for the rise of the medical profession, he will find no sufficient 
explanation of this in science itself, but in an historic fact antece- 
dent to all science, the first violation of moral laws imposed upon 
man, by his Creator. It involves questions which do not belong 
to medical science, as sucb, but to a totally different department 
of investigation—none the less important on this account, but all 
the more worthy of moral consideration, as throwing a peculiar 
sacredness around the profession itself. 
The remotest authentic account we possess of the “ Healing 
Art” is a Biblical record; now 3500 years old, or dating 1700 
before Christ. The less authentic and somewhat earlier accounts, 
deciphered by Egyptologists like Champollion and Brugsch, are 
but records of a science whose immemorial triumphs bad even then 
exalted it to the dignity of a sacred profession. That remarkable 
remnant of medicine found in the writings of Moses, the system of 
public and domestic Hygiene, enforced by a religious sanction, is 
acknowledged by the lights of modern medical science to be of un- 
surpassed beneficence and wisdom. The prophet-legislator of the 
Hebrews lias recapitulated a Leviticus of Hygienic precepts, whose 
theories of prevention, cure, and improvement, are admitted, on 
all hands, to rest upon principles of scientific and incontestible 
value. The antiquity and progress of the profession are historic 
proof against the charge that it is a mere trifling with sickened 
and dying humanity. It was the first necessity for the body, as 
religion was for the soul. Four thousand years, it claimed and 
wore a sacerdotal character. Two-thirds of that time the physician 
and the minister of truth were the same person, and the religious 
temples schools of medicine. Fifteen centuries of the Christian 
era passed away before that necessary divorce between Sacerdotal- 
ism and science took place, which the ignorance of the former and 
the progress of the latter had made inevitable—a divorce of incal- 
culable blessing to the world. 
India and Egypt shone pre-eminent in medical science 20U0 
years before the Christian era. Greece, 1200 years before Christ, 
reared temples to Aesculapius. The Argonautic heroes, and the 
chief commanders at the seige of Troy, were professional teachers 
of medicine. To be one of the Asclepiadse, a descendant of Aescu- 
lapius, “the mild artificer of help from pain, the demigod that 
wards diseases off,” was a passport through the world. The 4 
blooming Age, or “Rose of Pericles,” the classic era of Demos- 
thenes, Plato, and Aristotle, the palmy days of the Greek repub- 
lics, nearly contemporaneous with the age of Confucius, was the 
culminating period of Greek medicine. The great Hippocrates 
appeared, whose aphorisms remain to this day, imperishable 
memorials of his skill, and whose scientific deductions have stood, 
unscathed, the test of 2000 years. Roman medicine culminated 
600 years later in Galen, less followed though equally renowned. 
His fame contributed to enhance the transient luster of the 
“ Antonine Age” in history, the age of Marcus Aurelius, the 
brightest episode in the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. 
In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, Paul JEgineta, A. D. 600, 
appeared as the last and most celebrated of the Byzantine physi- 
cians and surgeons, imparting an impetus to the science, which 
continued its progress through Saracenic and Turkish invasions, 
till the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Under the munificence 
of the Caliphs of the middle age, Haroun-al-Raschid standing 
forth as chief patron, the splendor of Arabian scientific medicine 
illuminated the Moslem ascendancy in its three chief centers of 
Bagdad, Cordova, and Cairo. Medical schools, hospitals and 
libraries arose, everywhere, beside the glittering Mosques. Sur- 
gery, physiology, anatomy, chemistry and pharmacy, received a 
new impulse. The Spanish cities, alone, boasted seventy libraries 
and 150,000 medical works. It was reserved, however for the era 
of the great reformation in the sixteenth century to inspire medical 
science with new life, such as never before was felt, and the in- 
fluence of which will pass on to the latest times. The flight of the 
Greeks from Constantinople, when it fell, contributed to the revival 
of medicine, as well as of letters, not only in Italy, but also in 
England, Germany, and France. The spirit of free investigation 
that sparkled in the age of Charlemagne was a forelight of the 
blaze that burst forth in the times of Leo. X. the phospor of a 
coming sunrise that broke, in its effulgence, on the night of a 
thousand years. Ignorant Sacerdotalism had degraded the medical 
profession. A wooden-headed clergy had cultivated pathology and 
therapeutics bv the syllogisms of Aristotle and the rules of the 
canon law ; much what as if a man should study anatomy by the 
glorv-holes of glass-furnaces and rolling-mills, geology by the de- 
bris of a brick-kiln, and botany by hay-stacks in the barn-yard 
and stubble in the corn-fields. The lever of Laureutius Valla, the 5 
sledge-hammer of Luther, and the broad-axe of Calvin, brought 
the blind idol of dogmatic authority, in things too high for it, down 
to the ground. All along the Mediterranean shore, the murmur 
of a new conflict went sounding through the nations, and woke to 
life the spirit of a new investigation which ran, magnetic, through 
all the European Universities. The deliverance of Europe from 
sacerdotal interference in science was a victory which trans- 
ferred the center of the scientific empire from Rome to London 
and the institutions of Great Britain and Germany, and after- 
wards to those of France. 
It were folly to think that a profession so vast and difficult, 
threading its way by the clue of observation and experiment alone, 
through mazes, compared with which the labyrinth of the Cretan 
Minotaur was a joke, and contending with astrological and necro- 
matic superstitions, dark as night, should not be amenable to the 
accusation of serious mistake. It never boasted that it was 
Minerva panoplied in perfection from the brain of Jove, still less 
that it is a divine revelation and its practitioners infallible men, 
and still less again that it is proof against all imposture, or the 
wicked disgrace of its own diplomas by unworthy men. Medical 
science is a creation, built upon other sciences to which the pro- 
fession gave birth in order to find the means necessary to bring 
itself to perfection. It behoved other sciences to exist and con- 
tribute their treasures back to their parent source. Every question 
settled was a question planted around which new questions were 
continually springing, a mystery solved opening a score of new 
problems. For this time, accumulation of facts, and practice, 
with cautious test of new methods, were necessary, all which the 
pretender despises, and not mere theory, blind conjecture, and 
sharj) trade, all of which the pretender employs. When, therefore, 
disease and death put on new forms, the opportunity presented 
itself to the rash speculator, not less than to the daring pretender, 
and greedy empiric, to proclaim their philosophy, display their 
nostrums, advertise their inventions, pursue their treatment, and 
carry off their ill-gotten gains. “ Galen dat ope*,”— “ medicine 
makes rich, ”—was their supreme motto and inspiration. Like 
Mephistopheles in Faust, they thought “the spirit of medicine is 
easy to be caught,” and that “he who avails himself of the passing 
moment, is the proper man.” What wonder, if the public disap- 
pointment should provoke the brilliant shaft of Voltaire, and 6 
the satire of Moliere and Montaigue, and that the proverb, 
“flee doctors and drugs if you wish to be well.” “ Fuge med- 
icos, et medicamenta, si vis esse salvus,” should actually have 
been fathered by one of the medical profession himself? From 
such abuse of science charlatans have their genesis and pedi- 
gree. But to cast reproach on the profession for this, is unjust as 
to say that the science of theology is a sham because so many who 
profess it know nothing of what it requires, or the pulpit a fraud 
because so many are incompetent who wear the clerical title. 
Society has but one duty to perform toward the medical pretender, 
the pill-and-worm doctor, the slow poisoner, bone-setter, witch- 
finder, patent medicine vender, and advertizer of high crimes 
against God and man, motley hybrid of imposter and vagrant, 
wandering about sometimes in the garb of “ country-clergyman,” 
at others, in that of a “city philanthropist,” whose only right is to 
a lamp-post and halter. It is to treat him as the outcast of his 
profession, a murderer of innocent victims, excommunicated for 
his depravity and crimes against yourselves and your children—a 
violator of that commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” whether 
by slow poison, lies, or quick steel—a commandment the most read- 
ily recognized by all as of universal obligation. I think you will 
he pleased to know that in Egyptology, the hieroglyphic character 
that represents a charlatan in medicine is the figure of a “ duck,” 
that waddling spoon-billed fowl of the barn-yard, the phonetic 
translation of which is—“ Quack !” 
I praise the profession for its matchless victories compared with 
which all its honest mistakes are as light dust of the balance. To 
medicine the planet is indebted for the arrest, and well-nigh com- 
plete expulsion, of those fearful scourges with which the dissolu- 
tion of morals, and convulsions of dying nations, have visited 
humanity. How realize, to-day, the Peloponnessian plague, so 
vividly described by Thucydides, contemporaneous with the cor- 
rupt decline of Grecian life; or those described by Roman authors 
contemporaneous with the dea"h-throes of the western empire; or 
that nameless Arabian rot sprung from the Mohammedan invasion 
of Europe ; or that spreading leprosy which spotted the crusaders’ 
time? How measure, to-day, those fearful and ou‘ breaking diseases 
of insanity, lycanthropv and vampirism, or the untold horrors of 
of the three appalling epidemics the “black-death,” “sweating- 
sickness,” and “small-pox,” which closed the gloomy night of the 7 
middle age, and left their marks this side of the reformation ? 
Find fault with the medical faculty ! As well find fault with the 
final charge of Wellington’s guards at Waterloo, or the English 
light horse at Balaklava! When death, like a huge dark vulture, 
hovered, sailing in the air, and shook plague, poison, and disease, 
from its wings, all over the face of European society, and a pes- 
tilential breath swept like a blast from the fetid nostrils of the 
destroyer;—when 3,000,000 a year, of human victims succumbed 
to their fate—when dissolution defied arrest, and the mortuary 
pall hung over every home now a sepulchre, and despair alone an- 
swered the piteous cry for help; it was then the medical faculty 
came to the rescue of suffering humanity, and Europe, to-day, 
redeemed by its skill, celebrates in statues and monuments, the 
deliverers of its cities and homes from preternatural foes no armies 
could conquer. Over six thousand devoted practitioners, whom 
the malaria of death could not deter from danger, fell a sacrifice 
to their heroic fidelity and zeal. And then came Jenner!—I 
am proud to know he was the son of a clergyman. Jenner ! horn 
and reared in the cow-pastures of Gloucester—fame has no niche 
in her temple too lofty for him to occupy, the nations no trumpet 
too loud to sound his praise! The “gilded butt for piercing arrows 
of detraction,” he spent his fortune and his life for the salvation of 
men! Orion in the heavens is not more illustrious among the con- 
stellations, than he in vour scientific galaxy. Sooner shall Lyra 
loose her strings and make music no more, and Andromeda 
exchange her shining veil for mourning, than the name of Jenner 
shall be forgotten ! What bloom untarnished, and what beauty, 
has he left upon the maiden’s cheek! What purity infused into 
the yeoman’s blood ! What health and happiness in homes where 
Variola knocks to find an entrance, and Jenner, by the living and 
protecting mouth of the profession, thunders No! 
During the last century, medical science has been redeemed, to 
such an extent, from superstition, speculation and empiricism, that 
it now stands among the exact sciences, built upon the solid basis 
of fact and demonstration. Pare, Boerhaave, Berzelius, Morgagni, 
Harvey, and Linseus, have each been followed, respectively, in 
surgery, materia medica, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and 
medical botany, by a shining train of scientific* observers who have 
achieved universal renown. Once, the physician stood outside the 
temple of the human frame, baffled to find lfis way to the interior. 8 
“ Post mortem” was his only guide. Now, he masters all. The 
laws of light, heat, and sound, electrical and chemical test’s, lenses, 
and a forest of new instruments, with new methods, enable him 
to read the interior of the living man more truly than if dead. 
He puts his instrument upon your eye, and spies the secret of 
your brain, and upon your breast and tells you the condition of 
your heart and lungs; the way you breathe, the circulation of 
your blood. It is as if a man should look down the chimney and 
describe the contents of the cellar, plant his ear at the front door 
and repeat the whisper in the garret or the parlor. Your whole 
nervous structure is so completely at his will, that he can measure 
the velocity of thought and sensation along the telegraphic lines 
inside. He maps you out accurately as the engineer a mountain. 
His microscope unfolds the structure of your finest tissue. His 
spectroscope pursues the drug he gives you, to the remotest corner 
of your frame. The precise force of each muscle is determined, 
the feeblest pulse-beat, the faintest sigh, the transformation of your 
food at every step, the disposition of every vital organ and process. 
He sends new currents through your languid frame to give you 
life, and, by the vapors of his anaesthetic agents, extracts a 
tooth, resets a fractured limb, or cuts away a shoulder-blade, or 
splits a skull, with perfect safety, and without a consciousness of 
pain. It is all the triumph of pathological anatomy, organic 
chemistry, electro-physiology, and conservative surgery. In 
materia medica and therapeutics, the drugs, or agents of remedy, 
once occupying the chief place in the remedial armament of the 
profession, have been remanded to a subordinate position, the re- 
sult of physiological research, chemical analysis, and clinical expe- 
rience. It is fortunate for us, and for the druggist too ! The old 
prescription was a whole apothecary’s shop, a whole dispensary in 
itself, born of compounds and farragos, like that illustrious and 
historic “ Theriacum,” composed of sixty-six different, ingredients, 
some of which I name, to be taken twice a day for seven years, if 
necessary, externally, internally, and eternally, “dose doubled at 
the full moon,” in desperate cases ; to-wit, some twenty different 
vegetables with as many minerals, balsams, and gums, with squills, 
carrot-seed, liquorice, turpentine and cayenne pepper, powder of 
roasted brass, poppy-juice, white wax, calamus root, rhaponticum, 
castor-bean, gentian, horehound, attic honey, ginger, paregoric, 
Lenmian earth, owl’s blood, and Falernian wine!—said to be excel- 9 
lent also as a tooth-powder! It is one of the glories of the profession 
that, notwithstanding the reputed virtues of the compound, com- 
mensurate with the cure, of the whole Iliad of Trojan woes, it 
was consigned to its grave 500 years before the Reformation, 
with the head-stone “died of exhaustion,” the whole pharma- 
copaea standing round as chief mourners! Peace to the shades 
of Dioscorides and his Theriacs! The profession accepted pro- 
gress ? I beg pardon of the profession — the scholastic era 
will furnish our medical friends with a heavier illustration against 
the theologians! The revolution in materia medica and thera- 
peutics has made the recurrence of illusory compounds almost 
impossible, and established practical medicine upon the immovable 
basis of clinical experience alone. It has done more by its pro- 
found. study of physiology and pathology, anatomy and chemistry. 
It has made the foresight and prevention of disease the great and 
final aim of the profession. To this end all scientific study is 
concentrated. Hygiene, and not medication, is the word that rules 
the hour. It is the harmony of science with art, theory with prac- 
tice, and experience the key-note of both. The signal triumphs 
of that branch of the profession, of such unspeakable importance to 
the birth of the human race, and redeemed from profane hands bv 
the labors of Recamier, Atlee, Meigs, Sims, and Battey, I pass by. 
The profession is not less meritorious, as one of the noblest aux- 
iliaries to natural religion, and the high verities of the Christian 
revelation. I am aware the charge of materialism, atheism and 
infidelity has been brought against it, and the announcement made 
that its scientific conclusions subvert the three great truths of nat- 
ural religion, viz: God, the Soul, and Immortality, and by conse- 
quence Christianity itself. I am aware also, that some of the 
profession in common with others, have asserted this folly. But 
medical science as such is no more responsible for this than are 
theology, metaphysics, ethics, astronomy and geology where like 
folly has been committed. Astronomy is not atheistic, because La 
Grange boasted he could not discover God through his telescope, nor 
is medical science unbelieving because Moleschott and Maudsley 
cannot find the soul beneath the scalpel and microscope, or Bastian 
and Biichner detect it, by chemical tests. The bloom of a rank 
sun-flower planted over a grave, or the trump of fame, or the per- 
petuation of personal influence, or the succession of generations, is 
not the only immortality, because Oken and Spiller view it in this 10 
way. Thought, moral emotion, and religious belief, are not secretions 
of matter, as bile is from the liver, as Caban is thought, or the re- 
sult of currents of electricity generated in the cells of the gray 
matter of the brain,—illusions like phosphorescent “ will-o-the-wisps” 
and “ jacks-o-the-lantern, ” floating on the quagmires and bogs,— 
because Vogt went mad. This is not science, hut the perversion 
of science. I submit it is not the province of the medical science 
as such, to decide upon the evidences of divine revelation, any more 
than it is the province of theology to decide upon the facts of science. 
I submit also that faith in a divine testimony is one thing, and 
faith in conclusions drawn from the study of physical phenomena 
is quite another, and that there is no conflict between them. The 
limits of the natural sciences are all girdled with dark boundaries 
of mystery into which science cannot penetrate, while yet the light 
of science blends with the light that bursts by revelation, from the 
dark and deep beyond. 
The maxim that “to the physician as a physician, the sonl is un- 
known, ”—“medico, qua medians anima ignota est, ” is untrue even in 
a scientific sense. From the beginning to the present time, the 
intelligent spirit has ever been recognized by the profession, as an 
independent self-conscious personality, endowed with will and pow- 
er, distinct from matter, and accepted by the physician, as a co- 
operating cause, either with or against his treatment, according as 
he has taken a right or wrong view of its relations to the body, in 
sickness and disease. It is Aristotle’s “Sailor in the boat,” the 
“Unknown Agent” of Hippocrates, Galen’s “Mover of the Body,” 
Stahl’s “Vital Principle, ’’Broussai’s “Algebraic’s,” and Carpenter’s 
“Immaterial Essence whose determinations react on the living or- 
ganism.” The collective phenomena of life are not all explicable 
merely by mechanical, chemical and animal action. Many mys- 
teries of nutrition, growth, disease, morbid affections and cure, 
admit only of explanation by recognizing it as a distinct factor, 
different from the house it inhabits. It is another of the glories of 
the medical profession that it has demonstrated the impossibility of 
the materialistic hypothesis which makes human faith and thought 
dependant on matter, and throws the whole force of science in favor 
of a self-conscious spirit surviving its decay and dissolution. It 
has established the fact that no possible explanation of mental phe- 
nomena can be founded on the hypothesis which attempts to evolve 
or derive these phenomena from physical processes. The skillful 11 
anatomist will cut away a whole hemisphere of the brain, slice by 
slice, and find the Apostle’s Creed or the Ten Commandments, 
faith in God and hope of immortality, with all the mental faculties, 
just as strong as before the chloroform and knife began their work. 
The living spirit is the same, its creed the same. Its etherial es- 
sence survives the knife, the martyr’s flame, the tomb! 
When you think of physicians, remember that Linnseus the father 
of botany, Cuvier the constructor of the most comprehensive system 
of the universe, and Sir Humphrey Davy the brilliant chemist, were 
physicians wholike Volta, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Leibnitz, New- 
ton and Faraday in other departments, were religious men, and 
that in the ranks of no other profession are found brighter examples 
of the Christian faith. It is Sir Humphrey Davy who says: “I envy no 
quality of the mind or intellect in others, be it genius, wit, power 
or fancy; but what I deem most delightful and useful to me is a 
firm religious belief, for it makes life a discipline of goodness, creates 
new hopes when all earthly hopes vanish, throws over the destruc- 
tion of existence the most gorgeous of all lights, awakens life in death 
and from corruption and decay calls up beauty and divinity.” It 
will be sometime before the medical profession consent to regard 
these sentiments of the great chemist as combinations of oxygen 
and nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon, illuminated by streaks of 
electricity shooting through the gray matter of the brain!—or that, 
“in the beginning” an imperial quart of oxygen, at 92° Fahrenheit, 
‘ ‘ created the heavens and the earth ! ” 
The dignity and sanctity of the medical profession call for uni- 
versal acknowledgement. Its chief excellence is, not that it is 
scientific, but that it is redemptive. The physician is not only the 
interpreter of Nature inquiring at her oracle and with a noble in- 
dependence of mind sacrificing all prejudices and theories for the 
sake of truth, but he is the minister of Nature ordained to preside 
in her temple, proclaim her mysteries of healing, and offer up his 
life as incense at her shrine. He is more. He is a messenger of 
mercy to man, not less than an angel of knowledge, in the sanctity 
of a service which consoles the sufferer, takes from disease its pain, 
restores health to the dying, an l robs death of its temporal sting. 
“ The profession of the physician,” says Thomas Carlyle, “is radical- 
ly a sacred one, not only in itself considered, but i3 connected with 
the highest priestho )d of healing the world ever saw, and is itself 
the acme an l outcome of all priesthoods and divinest conquests here 12 
below.” I endorse that sentiment, not only as just, but is founded 
on historic fact, and add with Dr. Russell of the Royal College of 
Physicians in London, that “In the modern estimate of civilization, 
sufficient value is not given to the medical profession, the most 
God-like function that can be exercised by a human being,—a 
function discharged in its ideal perfection only by the Son of Man ! ” 
In graphic and beautiful words, DeQuincey describes the sanctity 
which attaches to it, in Eastern lands. “From Barbary to Hindoo- 
stan, from the rising to the setting sun, no traveler is more secure 
than the Hakim or physician. As he advances on his route, the 
news flies before him. Disease is evoked on as by the rod of Am ram’s 
son. The beds of the sick of every rank are ranged along the road 
sides, and the dispenser of health, or relief, moves through the 
prayers of hope on the one side, and the praises of gratitude oti the 
other.” But above all, it is the “Kohinoor,” the central gem of 
the profession, that the most benevolent Being who ever trod our 
planet, introduced himself to the attentions of men as the good 
physician, and consecrated the healing art, as a symbol of the sad- 
dest pathology in which “sin” is the one disease, and that miracu- 
lous therapeutics in which “ Himself ” is the one medicine for 
mankind. Since then, the aroma of his name has floated around 
it, like the scent of the rose around the vase and it perfumed adorned. 
In the words of Dr. Willis, “the servant of religion hath not more 
of true sanctity about him than the good physician. Of old, the 
practice of medicine was a service rendered in special temples to 
the deity. It is not extinct yet upon earth, but has its ministering 
priest, ennobled by Christianity, in every worthy member of the 
profession.” In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, 
in the name of every sacred interest, why is it that enlightened 
society does not rise in its might, and compel a legislation, from all 
our Capitals, which shall protect a profession of such sanction and 
dignity, built on such science, and pervaded with such high respon- 
sibilities,— a profession whose very name is the truinpet-note of 
rendezvous for the helpless and ignorant, the diseased and the dy- 
ing,—from the prostitution of the advertising impostor in religious 
and secular journals, and from the mercenary practices of the 
marauding and murdering charlatan? In all the older civilizations, 
the measure of respect and protection for the physician, not less 
than for the prophet, was the index of the moral weakness or vigor 
of the social state. From this alone the fate of nations was foretold. 13 
It is still, and will remain, the test of our intelligence, our manners, 
and. strength. 
The moral, confidential and self-denying relations of the profes- 
sion to society claim our highest regard and utmost consideration. Its 
universal benevolence, untiring devotion, its perpetual burdens and 
trials, the tax on its sympathies, anxieties and cares demand a re- 
cognition, among all classes, which only the basest ingratitude can 
with-hold. When we reflect on what it has done for the human 
race, and that now every family, with scarcely an exception in 
Christendom, is more or less visited by a physician, that no sooner 
does nature call for help, or injury and disease appear, than the 
physician is summoned to our aid, that wherever wretchedness and 
deatli confront us he is at once by our side to minister to our relief. 
I say, when we remember these things, there is no recompense too 
great, and no esteem too high for us to render, or for him to receive. 
What intimate relations, and what serious responsibilities.! He 
enters into our most secret domestic sanctities. He comes to us 
when caution is disarmed by affliction. Our sources of disease are 
oftentimes domestic and mental troubles, and he becomes the cus- 
todian of what we would hide from our nearest friend. We receive 
him as an angel of God, to do us good. His honor, as a gentleman 
is the gaurantee of our trust and our peace. We look on him as 
the friend of religion and morality, and feel safe in his hands. He 
mingles with, all varieties of men, visiting not only the mansions of 
the rich but the hovels of the poor, opening human hearts, dispens- 
ing remedies, and scattering sunshine in his path. He “ heals our 
diseases, and redeems our life from destruction.” “In all our afflic- 
tions, he is afflicted.” The complaints of the sick, the murmurs of 
the impatient, the criticisms of the uncharitable, the moan of the 
sufferer, and the lamentations of the bereaved, are ceaseless in his 
ears. Calamity strikes us, he becomes our friend, and seeks to re- 
lieve our spirit by consolations imparted from his own. He makes 
our wishes and wants, our interest and advantage, his care. With 
scarce an hour, or a home, he can claim as his own; he waits, a 
servant at our call. By day and by night, in summer and winter, 
in sunshine and storm, early and late, at midnight or noon, distant 
or near, sick or well, he moves among us, living not to himself, but 
to us, burdened with a thousand anxious thoughts, pondering the' 
mysteries of our own ailments, and how the soonest to restore to us 
the blessings of health and enjoyment of family and friends. He 14 
“keeps vigil over mortality.” He presides at the birth of the 
human race, attends by its side every step of its way, and stands 
at its bier. The cradle and the grave are the bounds of his prac- 
tice, the living and the dead his debtors forever. He is the hope 
of the suffering babe, the strerfgth of the old man crowned with 
silver hair, the mother’s life, the father’s gratitude, the brother and 
sister’s joy. To him the eyes of the wounded are turned on the 
field of battle, and on the hospital bed. The prisoner in his 
cell, and the culprit on the scaffold, alike acknowledge his care. 
I avow it. On evefy side, the memorials of the benignity of the 
medical profession, arise in every place, to attest its self-denying 
fidelity and zeal. The breath of its universal benevolence salutes 
all mankind. No ministry has done more to extend the boundaries 
of human knowledge, none more to alleviate the sufferings of the 
human race. Humanity has no wealth adequate to its compensa- 
tion, no gratitude sufficient for its reward. 
Let society cherish then, and exalt its medical community. 
Treat your physician as your friend, a brother in your house. Ac- 
cord to him his rightful place, side by side with the true and honest 
servant of religion. Let “ Epaphroditus” and “Luke” be equal 
brothers at your social board, and equal sharers of all your hospital- 
ities and regards. You might lose an estate and live well without 
it, a place of influence or trust, and time would restore it. But, 
what compensation can family or society offer for the lack of a good 
physician, in a critical hour ? How many eyes now sparkle with 
the luster of life that, but for him, had been closed in darkness and 
death! How many pulses throb warm with affection which, but 
for his skill had been silent and cold! And when misfortune shall 
come, and remove some object dear to your heart, and the decree 
of God render void the physician’s skill murmur not at the Divine 
Will nor sink below the noble Socrates who when condemned by 
the judges to drink the hemlock, made an offering to ACsculapius in 
memory of the mercies received from the medical profession. 
“Honor the physician with the honor due.to him. Of the most 
high cometh healing, and he shall receive honor of kings. The 
skill of a physician shall lift up his head, and in sight of the great 
he shall be in admiration. In thy sickness, order thine hands aright. 
Give the L)rd a sweet savor, a memorial of fine flour, and make a 
fat offering; then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath 
created him, and thou hast need of him. ”