In his appendix to “Variolae Triumphatae,” he says,—­

“There has been a wonderful practice lately used in several parts of the world, which indeed is not yet become common in our nation.

“I was first informed of it by a Garamantee servant of my own, long before I knew that any Europeans or Asiaticks had the least acquaintance with it, and some years before I was enriched with the communications of the learned Foreigners, whose accounts I found agreeing with what I received of my servant, when he shewed me the Scar of the Wound made for the operation; and said, That no person ever died of the smallpox, in their countrey, that had the courage to use it.

“I have since met with a considerable Number of these Africans, who all agree in one story; That in their countrey grandy-many dy of the small-pox:  But now they learn this way:  people take juice of smallpox and cutty-skin and put in a Drop; then by’nd by a little sicky, sicky:  then very few little things like small-pox; and nobody dy of it; and nobody have small-pox any more.  Thus, in Africa, where the poor creatures dy of the smallpox like Rotten Sheep, a merciful God has taught them an Infallible preservative.  ’T is a common practice, and is attended with a constant success.”

What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice, in the hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and reasonable.  I suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in which the colonists found themselves in the wilderness, took the nonsense out of them, as the exigencies of a campaign did out of our physicians and surgeons in the late war.  Good food and enough of it, pure air and water, cleanliness, good attendance, an anaesthetic, an opiate, a stimulant, quinine, and two or three common drugs, proved to be the marrow of medical treatment; and the fopperies of the pharmacopoeia went the way of embroidered shirts and white kid gloves and malacca joints, in their time of need.  “Good wine is the best cordiall for her,” said Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to Samuel Symonds, speaking of that gentleman’s wife,—­just as Sydenham, instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary for his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development until it became entirely separated from that of divinity.  The spiritual guide, the consoler in affliction, the confessor who is admitted into the secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of duties; but the healer of men must confine himself solely to the revelations of God in nature, as he sees their miracles with his own eyes.  No doctrine of prayer or special providence is to be his excuse for not looking straight at secondary causes, and acting, exactly so far as experience justifies him, as if he were himself the divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be.  While pious men were praying—­humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to their knowledge—­over