“The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the rise of the great river.  He longs to rescue individuals, to protect communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies.  He uses all the means which experience has approved, tries every rational method which ingenuity can suggest.  Some fortunate recovery leads him to believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady which had resisted all known remedies.  His rescued patient sounds his praises, and a wide circle of his patient’s friends joins in a chorus of eulogies.  Self-love applauds him for his sagacity.  Self-interest congratulates him on his having found the road to fortune; the sense of having proved a benefactor of his race smooths the pillow on which he lays his head to dream of the brilliant future opening before him.  If a single coincidence may lead a person of sanguine disposition to believe that he has mastered a disease which had baffled all who were before his time, and on which his contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence, what must be the effect of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer temper!  Such series of coincidences will happen, and they may well deceive the very elect.  Think of Dr. Rush,—­you know what a famous man he was, the very head and front of American medical science in his day, —­and remember how he spoke about yellow fever, which he thought he had mastered!

“Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy, in which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself, are involved.  What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great an extent a record of self-delusion!

“If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true science and art of healing, I will remind you that it is all implied in the first aphorism of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.  Do not draw a wrong inference from the frank statement of the difficulties which beset the medical practitioner.  Think rather, if truth is so hard of attainment, how precious are the results which the consent of the wisest and most experienced among the healers of men agrees in accepting.  Think what folly it is to cast them aside in favor of palpable impositions stolen from the records of forgotten charlatanism, or of fantastic speculations spun from the squinting brains of theorists as wild as the Egyptian astronomer.

“Begin your medical studies, then, by reading the fortieth and the following four chapters of ‘Rasselas.’  Your first lesson will teach you modesty and caution in the pursuit of the most deceptive of all practical branches of knowledge.  Faith will come later, when you learn how much medical science and art have actually achieved for the relief of mankind, and how great are the promises it holds out of still larger triumphs over the enemies of human health and happiness.”

After the reading of this paper there was a lively discussion, which we have no room to report here, and the Society adjourned.