But your education has, after all, been very largely practical.  You have studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the bedside and in the operating amphitheatre.  It is the special advantage of large cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing a great deal of disease in a short space of time, and of seeing many cases of the same kind of disease brought together.  Let us not be unjust to the claims of the schools remote from the larger centres of population.  Who among us has taught better than Nathan Smith, better than Elisha Bartlett? who teaches better than some of our living contemporaries who divide their time between city and country schools?  I am afraid we do not always do justice to our country brethren, whose merits are less conspicuously exhibited than those of the great city physicians and surgeons, such especially as have charge of large hospitals.  There are modest practitioners living in remote rural districts who are gifted by nature with such sagacity and wisdom, trained so well in what is most essential to the practice of their art, taught so thoroughly by varied experience, forced to such manly self-reliance by their comparative isolation, that, from converse with them alone, from riding with them on their long rounds as they pass from village to village, from talking over cases with them, putting up their prescriptions, watching their expedients, listening to their cautions, marking the event of their predictions, hearing them tell of their mistakes, and now and then glory a little in the detection of another’s blunder, a young man would find himself better fitted for his real work than many who have followed long courses of lectures and passed a showy examination.  But the young man is exceptionally fortunate who enjoys the intimacy of such a teacher.  And it must be confessed that the great hospitals, infirmaries, and dispensaries of large cities, where men of well-sifted reputations are in constant attendance, are the true centres of medical education.  No students, I believe, are more thoroughly aware of this than those who have graduated at this institution.  Here, as in all our larger city schools, the greatest pains are taken to teach things as well as names.  You have entered into the inheritance of a vast amount of transmitted skill and wisdom, which you have taken, warm, as it were, with the life of your well-schooled instructors.  You have not learned all that art has to teach you, but you are safer practitioners to-day than were many of those whose names we hardly mention without a genuflection.  I had rather be cared for in a fever by the best-taught among you than by the renowned Fernelius or the illustrious Boerhaave, could they come back to us from that better world where there are no physicians needed, and, if the old adage can be trusted, not many within call.  I had rather have one of you exercise his surgical skill upon me than find myself in the hands of a resuscitated Fabricius Hildanus, or even of a wise Ambroise Pare, revisiting earth in the light of the nineteenth century.