One or two other facts deserve mention, as showing the readiness of our medical community to receive and adopt any important idea or discovery.  The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was first brought fully before the profession of this country by the translation of Bichat’s great work, “Anatomie Generale,” by the late Dr. George Hayward.

The first work printed in this country on Auscultation,—­that wonderful art of discovering disease, which, as it were, puts a window in the breast, through which the vital organs can be seen, to all intents and purposes, was the manual published anonymously by “A Member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.”

We are now in some slight measure prepared to weigh the record of the medical profession in Massachusetts, and pass our judgment upon it.  But in-order to do justice to the first generation of practitioners, we must compare what we know of their treatment of disease with the state of the art in England, and the superstitions which they saw all around them in other departments of knowledge or belief.

English medical literature must have been at a pretty low ebb when Sydenham recommended Don Quixote to Sir Richard Blackmore for professional reading.  The College Pharmacopoeia was loaded with the most absurd compound mixtures, one of the most complex of which (the same which the Reverend Mr. Harward, “Lecturer at the Royal Chappel in Boston,” tried to simplify), was not dropped until the year 1801.  Sir Kenelm Digby was playing his fantastic tricks with the Sympathetic powder, and teaching Governor Winthrop, the second, how to cure fever and ague, which some may like to know.  “Pare the patient’s nails; put the parings in a little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel, and put him in a tub of water.  The eel will die, and the patient will recover.”

Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of the royal touch in scrofula.  The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the manuscripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,—­the answer of the angel Raphael to the good man’s medical questions.  The illustrious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica.  Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his “friend, Mr. Wintrop,” I cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his sovereign remedy.

See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen.  Jonathan Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John Winthrop about alchemy,—­“mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are for finding it.”