of the established schools.  Of course Sydenham was much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to remind his reader.  “I must needs conclude,” he says, “either that I am void of merit, or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to gratitude, make a very small part of the whole.”  If in the fearless pursuit of truth you should find the world as ungracious in the nineteenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a lesson of self-reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious physician:  “’T is none of my business to inquire what other persons think, but to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no favor of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper.”

The physician has learned a great deal from the surgeon, who is naturally in advance of him, because he has a better opportunity of seeing the effects of his remedies.  Let me shorten one of Ambroise Pare’s stories for you.  There had been a great victory at the pass of Susa, and they were riding into the city.  The wounded cried out as the horses trampled them under their hoofs, which caused good Ambroise great pity, and made him wish himself back in Paris.  Going into a stable he saw four dead soldiers, and three desperately wounded, placed with their backs against the wall.  An old campaigner came up.—­“Can these fellows get well?” he said.  “No!” answered the surgeon.  Thereupon, the old soldier walked up to them and cut all their throats, sweetly, and without wrath (doulcement et sans cholere).  Ambroise told him he was a bad man to do such a thing.  “I hope to God;” he said, “somebody will do as much for me if I ever get into such a scrape” (accoustre de telle facon).  “I was not much salted in those days” (bien doux de sel), says Ambroise, “and little acquainted with the treatment of wounds.”  However, as he tells us, he proceeded to apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after the approved fashion of the time,—­with what torture to the patient may be guessed.  At last his precious oil gave out, and he used instead an insignificant mixture of his own contrivance.  He could not sleep that night for fear his patients who had not been scalded with the boiling oil would be poisoned by the gunpowder conveyed into their wounds by the balls.  To his surprise, he found them much better than the others the next morning, and resolved never again to burn his patients with hot oil for gun-shot wounds.

This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform which has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the farrago of external applications which had been a source of profit to apothecaries and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny complained of them.  A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church, laboring among the wounded of Bull Run, tells me they had nothing but water for dressing, and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to see how well the wounds did under that simple treatment.