REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science. With other Addresses and Essays.  By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.  Boston; Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

This volume contains seven occasional addresses and essays, written at various periods between 1812 and 1860.  The subjects of which it treats are “Homoeopathy, and its Kindred Delusions,” “Puerperal Fever, as a Private Pestilence,” “The Position and Prospects of the Medical Student,” “The Duties of the Physician,”—­a Valedictory Address to the Medical Graduates of Harvard University,—­“The Mechanism of Vital Actions,” “Some more Recent Views of Homoeopathy,” and “Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science.”  They are characterized by extensive information, fertile thought, strong convictions, keen wit, sound sense, and unflinching intellectual courage and self-trust.  They are valuable contributions to the literature of the medical profession, and at the same time have that peculiar fascination which distinguishes all the productions of Dr. Holmes’s ingenious and opulent mind.  The style is clear, crisp, sparkling, abounding in originalities of verbal combination and felicities of descriptive phrase.  In its movement, it bears the marks of a kind of mental impatience of the processes of slower, more dogged, and more cautious intellects, natural to a keen, bright, and swift intelligence, desirous of flashing the results of its operation in the briefest and most brilliant expression.  The argument, though founded on premises which have been gathered by careful observation and study, often disregards the forms of the logic whose spirit it obeys, and, by its frequent use of analogy and illustration, may sometimes dazzle and confuse the minds it seeks to convince.  In regard to opponents, it is not content with mere dialectic victory, but insinuates the subtle sting of wit to vex and irritate the sore places of defeat and humiliation.

The reputation which Dr. Holmes enjoys, as one of the most popular poets and prose-writers of the day, has made the public overlook the fact that literature has been the recreation of a life of which medical science has been the business.  By far the larger portion of his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession.  Perhaps the value and validity of the conclusions he records in this volume may be questioned from the very circumstance that he expresses them in the lucid and vigorous style of an accomplished man of letters.  “People,” says Macaulay, “are loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence.  It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound.  Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science.  Montagu was a brilliant rhetorician, and therefore, though he had