and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very moderate compensation.  Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time; but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers year after year, which seems to imply that he found believers and patrons.  You smiled when I related Sir Kenelm Digby’s prescription with the live eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets, would there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut, carried about as a cure for rheumatism?  The brazen head of Roger Bacon is mute; but is not “Planchette” uttering her responses in a hundred houses of this city?  We think of palmistry or chiromancy as belonging to the days of Albertus Magnus, or, if existing in our time, as given over to the gypsies; but a very distinguished person has recently shown me the line of life, and the line of fortune, on the palm of his hand, with a seeming confidence in the sanguine predictions of his career which had been drawn from them.  What shall we say of the plausible and well-dressed charlatans of our own time, who trade in false pretences, like Nicholas Knapp of old, but without any fear of being fined or whipped; or of the many follies and inanities, imposing on the credulous part of the community, each of them gaping with eager, open mouth for a gratuitous advertisement by the mention of its foolish name in any respectable connection?

I turn from this less pleasing aspect of the common intelligence which renders such follies possible, to close the honorable record of the medical profession in this, our ancient Commonwealth.

We have seen it in the first century divided among clergymen, magistrates, and regular practitioners; yet, on the whole, for the time, and under the circumstances, respectable, except where it invoked supernatural agencies to account for natural phenomena.

In the second century it simplified its practice, educated many intelligent practitioners, and began the work of organizing for concerted action, and for medical teaching.

In this, our own century, it has built hospitals, perfected and multiplied its associations and educational institutions, enlarged and created museums, and challenged a place in the world of science by its literature.

In reviewing the whole course of its history we read a long list of honored names, and a precious record written in private memories, in public charities, in permanent contributions to medical science, in generous sacrifices for the country.  We can point to our capital as the port of entry for the New World of the great medical discoveries of two successive centuries, and we can claim for it the triumph over the most dreaded foe that assails the human body,—­a triumph which the annals of the race can hardly match in three thousand years of medical history.

THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER

[A Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the Bellevue Hospital College, March 2, 1871.]