“This piece of advice has been used to throw contempt upon the study of books, and furnishes a convenient shield for ignorant pretenders.  But Sydenham left many writings in which he has recorded his medical experience, and he surely would not have published them if he had not thought they would be better reading for the medical student than the story of Cervantes.  His own works are esteemed to this day, and he certainly could not have supposed that they contained all the wisdom of all the past.  No remedy is good, it was said of old, unless applied at the right time in the right way.  So we may say of all anecdotes, like this which I have told you about Sydenham and the young man.  It is very likely that he carried him to the bedside of some patients, and talked to him about the cases he showed him, instead of putting a Latin volume in his hand.  I would as soon begin in that way as any other, with a student who had already mastered the preliminary branches,—­who knew enough about the structure and functions of the body in health.

“But if you ask me what reading I would commend to the medical student of a philosophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to hear me say it would be certain passages in ‘Rasselas.’  They are the ones where the astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management of the elements, the control of which, as he had persuaded himself, had been committed to him.  Let me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their tramping platoons.

“The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to him the secret of his wonderful powers:—­

“’Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit.  I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab.  The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.’

“The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere, devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these miraculous powers.  This is his account: 

“’One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt in my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern mountains, and raise the Nile to an inundation.  In the hurry of my imagination I commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my command with that of the inundation I found that the clouds had listened to my lips.’