In the mean time, the great stronghold of intellectual conservatism, traditional belief, has been assailed by facts which would have been indicted as blasphemy but a few generations ago.  Those new tables of the law, placed in the hands of the geologist by the same living God who spoke from Sinai to the Israelites of old, have remodelled the beliefs of half the civilized world.  The solemn scepticism of science has replaced the sneering doubts of witty philosophers.  The more positive knowledge we gain, the more we incline to question all that has been received without absolute proof.

As a matter of course, this movement has its partial reactions.  The province of faith is claimed as a port free of entry to unsupported individual convictions.  The tendency to question is met by the unanalyzing instinct of reverence.  The old church calls back its frightened truants.  Some who have lost their hereditary religious belief find a resource in the revelations of Spiritualism.  By a parallel movement, some of those who have become medical infidels pass over to the mystic band of believers in the fancied miracles of Homoeopathy.

Under these influences transmitted to, or at least shared by, the medical profession, the old question between “Nature,” so called, and “Art,” or professional tradition, has reappeared with new interest.  I say the old question, for Hippocrates stated the case on the side of “Nature” more than two thousand years ago.  Miss Florence Nightingale,—­and if I name her next to the august Father of the Healing Art, its noblest daughter well deserves that place of honor,—­Miss Florence Nightingale begins her late volume with a paraphrase of his statement.  But from a very early time to this there has always been a strong party against “Nature.”  Themison called the practice of Hippocrates “a meditation upon death.”  Dr. Rush says:  “It is impossible to calculate the mischief which Hippocrates, has done, by first marking Nature with his name and afterwards letting her loose upon sick people.  Millions have perished by her hands in all ages and countries.”  Sir John Forbes, whose defence of “Nature” in disease you all know, and to the testimonial in whose honor four of your Presidents have contributed, has been recently greeted, on retiring from the profession, with a wish that his retirement had been twenty years sooner, and the opinion that no man had done so much to destroy the confidence of the public in the medical profession.

In this Society we have had the Hippocratic and the Themisonic side fairly represented.  The treatise of one of your early Presidents on the Mercurial Treatment is familiar to my older listeners.  Others who have held the same office have been noted for the boldness of their practice, and even for partiality to the use of complex medication.