Especially will the old habit of violating the instincts of the sick give place to a judicious study of these same instincts.  It will be found that bodily, like mental insanity, is best managed, for the most part, by natural soothing agencies.  Two centuries ago there was a prescription for scurvy containing “stercoris taurini et anserini par, quantitas trium magnarum nucum,” of the hell-broth containing which “guoties-cumque sitit oeger, large bibit.”  When I have recalled the humane common-sense of Captain Cook in the matter of preventing this disease; when I have heard my friend, Mr. Dana, describing the avidity with which the scurvy-stricken sailors snuffed up the earthy fragrance of fresh raw potatoes, the food which was to supply the elements wanting to their spongy tissues, I have recognized that the perfection of art is often a return to nature, and seen in this single instance the germ of innumerable beneficent future medical reforms.

I cannot help believing that medical curative treatment will by and by resolve itself in great measure into modifications of the food, swallowed and breathed, and of the natural stimuli, and that less will be expected from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, either alien or assimilable.  The noted mineral-waters containing iron, sulphur, carbonic acid, supply nutritious or stimulating materials to the body as much as phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to the cereal plants.  The effects of a milk and vegetable diet, of gluten bread in diabetes, of cod-liver oil in phthisis, even of such audacious innovations as the water-cure and the grape-cure, are only hints of what will be accomplished when we have learned to discover what organic elements are deficient or in excess in a case of chronic disease, and the best way of correcting the abnormal condition, just as an agriculturist ascertains the wants of his crops and modifies the composition of his soil.  In acute febrile diseases we have long ago discovered that far above all drug-medication is the use of mild liquid diet in the period of excitement, and of stimulant and nutritious food in that of exhaustion.  Hippocrates himself was as particular about his barley-ptisan as any Florence Nightingale of our time could be.

The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession, belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies.  What is it that makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians?  His prescriptions consisted principally of simples.  An aperient or an opiate, a “cardiac” or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs.  It was not by his pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name.  It was by daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horseback for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and the noxious and often loathsome rubbish