"'Do not believe,'said he,with impatience,I that such objections could escape me:I reasoned long against my own conviction,and labored against truth with the utmost obstinacy.I sometimes suspected myself of madness,and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man like you,capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible and the incredible from the false.'
"The good old astronomer gives his parting directions to Imlac,whom he has adopted as his successor in the government of the elements and the seasons,in these impressive words:
"Do not,in the administration of the year,indulge thy pride by innovation;do not please thyself with thinking that thou canst make thyself renowned to all future ages by disordering the seasons.The memory of mischief is no desirable fame.Much less will it become thee to let kindness or interest prevail.Never rob other countries of rain to pour it on thine own.For us the Nile is sufficient.'
"Do you wonder,my friends,why I have chosen these passages,in which the delusions of an insane astronomer are related with all the pomp of the Johnsonian vocabulary,as the first lesson for the young person about to enter on the study of the science and art of healing?
Listen to me while I show you the parallel of the story of the astronomer in the history of medicine.
"This history is luminous with intelligence,radiant with benevolence,but all its wisdom and all its virtue have had to struggle with the ever-rising mists of delusion.The agencies which waste and destroy the race of mankind are vast and resistless as the elemental forces of nature;nay,they are themselves elemental forces.They may be to some extent avoided,to some extent diverted from their aim,to some extent resisted.So may the changes of the seasons,from cold that freezes to heats that strike with sudden death,be guarded against.So may the tides be in some small measure restrained in their inroads.So may the storms be breasted by walls they cannot shake from their foundations.But the seasons and the tides and the tempests work their will on the great scale upon whatever stands in their way;they feed or starve the tillers of the soil;they spare or drown the dwellers by the shore;they waft the seaman to his harbor or bury him in the angry billows.
"The art of the physician can do much to remove its subjects from deadly and dangerous influences,and something to control or arrest the effects of these influences.But look at the records of the life-insurance offices,and see how uniform is the action of nature's destroying agencies.Look at the annual reports of the deaths in any of our great cities,and see how their regularity approaches the uniformity of the tides,and their variations keep pace with those of the seasons.The inundations of the Nile are not more certainly to be predicted than the vast wave of infantile disease which flows in upon all our great cities with the growing heats of July,--than the fevers and dysenteries which visit our rural districts in the months of the falling leaf.
"The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the rise of the great river.He longs to rescue individuals,to protect communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies.He uses all the means which experience has approved,tries every rational method which ingenuity can suggest.Some fortunate recovery leads him to believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady which had resisted all known remedies.His rescued patient sounds his praises,and a wide circle of his patient's friends joins in a chorus of eulogies.Self-love applauds him for his sagacity.Self-interest congratulates him on his having found the road to fortune;the sense of having proved a benefactor of his race smooths the pillow on which he lays his head to dream of the brilliant future opening before him.If a single coincidence may lead a person of sanguine disposition to believe that he has mastered a disease which had baffled all who were before his time,and on which his contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence,what must be the effect of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer temper!
Such series of coincidences will happen,and they may well deceive the very elect.Think of Dr.Rush,--you know what a famous man he was,the very head and front of American medical science in his day,--and remember how he spoke about yellow fever,which he thought he had mastered!
"Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy,in which he and his patient and their friends,and-Nature herself,are involved.What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great an extent a record of self-delusion!
"If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true science and art of healing,I will remind you that it is all implied in the first aphorism of Hippocrates,the Father of Medicine.Do not draw a wrong inference from the frank statement of the difficulties which beset the medical practitioner.Think rather,if truth is so hard of attainment,how precious are the results which the consent of the wisest and most experienced among the healers of men agrees in accepting.Think what folly it is to cast them aside in favor of palpable impositions stolen from the records of forgotten charlatani**,or of fantastic speculations spun from the squinting brains of theorists as wild as the Egyptian astronomer.
"Begin your medical studies,then,by reading the fortieth and the following four chapters of 'Rasselas.'Your first lesson will teach you modesty and caution in the pursuit of the most deceptive of all practical branches of knowledge.Faith will come later,when you learn how much medical science and art have actually achieved for the relief of mankind,and how great are the promises it holds out of still larger triumphs over the enemies of human health and happiness."After the reading of this paper there was a lively discussion,which we have no room to report here,and the Society adjourned.
