We owe much to Chemistry, one of the most captivating as well as important of studies; but the medical man must as a general rule content himself with a clear view of its principles and a limited acquaintance with its facts; such especially as are pertinent to his pursuits.  I am in little danger of underrating Anatomy or Physiology; but as each of these branches splits up into specialties, any one of which may take up a scientific life-time, I would have them taught with a certain judgment and reserve, so that they shall not crowd the more immediately practical branches.  So of all the other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of knowledge, I would have them strictly subordinated to that particular kind of knowledge for which the community looks to its medical advisers.

A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as medicine itself is a science.  On the natural history side, medicine is a science; on the curative side, chiefly an art.  This is implied in Hufeland’s aphorism:  “The physician must generalize the disease and individualize the patient.”

The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we know about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of sickness.  We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its fruit; we eat the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its root.  Nothing but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato ball and cook the tomato.  So of most of our remedies.  The subchloride of mercury, calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of mercury, corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could have told us it would be so.

From observations like these we can obtain certain principles from which we can argue deductively to facts of a like nature, but the process is limited, and we are suspicious of all reasoning in that direction applied to the processes of healthy and diseased life.  We are continually appealing to special facts.  We are willing to give Liebig’s artificial milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the child anxiously whose wet-nurse is a chemist’s pipkin.  A pair of substantial mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned Professor’s brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for infants.

The bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching.  Certain branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner.  But the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit.  The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from practical skill, he may be a useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the health of the community is intrusted.