The public will give every honest and reasonably competent worker in the healing art a hearty welcome.  It is on the whole very loyal to the Medical Profession.  Three successive years have borne witness to the feeling with which this Institution, representing it in its educational aspect, is regarded by those who are themselves most honored and esteemed.  The great Master of Natural Science bade the last year’s class farewell in our behalf, in those accents which delight every audience.  The Head of our ancient University honored us in the same way in the preceding season.  And how can we forget that other occasion when the Chief Magistrate of the Commonwealth, that noble citizen whom we have just lost, large-souled, sweet-natured, always ready for every kind office, came among us at our bidding, and talked to us of our duties in words as full of wisdom as his heart was of goodness?

You have not much to fear, I think, from the fancy practitioners.  The vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another.  Homoeopathy has long been encysted, and is carried on the body medical as quietly as an old wen.  Every year gives you a more reasoning and reasonable people to deal with.  See how it is in Literature.  The dynasty of British dogmatists, after lasting a hundred years and more, is on its last legs.  Thomas Carlyle, third in the line of descent, finds an audience very different from those which listened to the silver speech of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the sonorous phrases of Samuel Johnson.  We read him, we smile at his clotted English, his “swarmery” and other picturesque expressions, but we lay down his tirade as we do one of Dr. Cumming’s interpretations of prophecy, which tells us that the world is coming to an end next week or next month, if the weather permits,—­not otherwise,—­feeling very sure that the weather will be unfavorable.

It is the same common-sense public you will appeal to.  The less pretension you make, the better they will like you in the long run.  I hope we shall make everything as plain and as simple to you as we can.  I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.  I know there are professors in this country who “ligate” arteries.  Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.  It is the familiarity and simplicity of bedside instruction which makes it so pleasant as well as so profitable.  A good clinical teacher is himself a Medical School.  We need not wonder that our young men are beginning to announce themselves not only as graduates of this or that College, but also as pupils of some one distinguished master.

I wish to close this Lecture, if you will allow me a few moments longer, with a brief sketch of an instructor and practitioner whose character was as nearly a model one in both capacities as I can find anywhere recorded.