Something after this manner might Master Giles Firmin have delivered his clinical instructions.  Somewhat in this way, a century and a half later, another New England physician, Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke, taught a young man who came to study with him, a very diligent and intelligent youth, James Jackson by name, the same whose portrait in his advanced years hangs upon this wall, long the honored Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, of whom I shall say something in this Lecture.  Our venerated Teacher studied assiduously afterwards in the great London Hospitals, but I think he used to quote his “old Master” ten times where he quoted Mr. Cline or Dr. Woodville once.

When I compare this direct transfer of the practical experience of a wise man into the mind of a student,—­every fact one that he can use in the battle of life and death,—­with the far off, unserviceable “scientific” truths that I and some others are in the habit of teaching, I cannot help asking myself whether, if we concede that our forefathers taught too little, there is not—­a possibility that we may sometimes attempt to teach too much.  I almost blush when I think of myself as describing the eight several facets on two slender processes of the palate bone, or the seven little twigs that branch off from the minute tympanic nerve, and I wonder whether my excellent colleague feels in the same way when he pictures himself as giving the constitution of neurin, which as he and I know very well is that of the hydrate of trimethyle-oxethyle-ammonium, or the formula for the production of alloxan, which, though none but the Professors and older students can be expected to remember it, is C10 H4 N4 O6+ 2ho, no5=C8 H4 N2 O10+2co2+N2+NH4 O, no5.

I can bear the voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the Anatomist and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation:  “What is this stuff with which you are cramming the brains of young men who are to hold the lives of the community in their hands?  Here is a man fallen in a fit; you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the two processes of the palate bone, but you have not had the sense to loosen that man’s neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a fool?  Here is a fellow that has just swallowed poison.  I want something to turn his stomach inside out at the shortest notice.  Oh, you have forgotten the dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember the formula for the production of alloxan!”

“Look you, Master Doctor,—­if I go to a carpenter to come and stop a leak in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care whether he is a botanist or not?  Cannot a man work in wood without knowing all about endogens and exogens, or must he attend Professor Gray’s Lectures before he can be trusted to make a box-trap?  If my horse casts a shoe, do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe him until I have made sure that he is sound on the distinction between the sesquioxide and the protosesquioxide of iron?”