All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.

SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS

[A Farewell Address to the Medical School of Harvard University, November 28, 1882.]

I had intended that the recitation of Friday last should be followed by a few parting words to my class and any friends who might happen to be in the lecture-room.  But I learned on the preceding evening that there was an expectation, a desire, that my farewell should take a somewhat different form; and not to disappoint the wishes of those whom I was anxious to gratify, I made up my mind to appear before you with such hasty preparation as the scanty time admitted.

There are three occasions upon which a human being has a right to consider himself as a centre of interest to those about him:  when he is christened, when he is married, and when he is buried.  Every one is the chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his own funeral.

There are other occasions, less momentous, in which one may make more of himself than under ordinary circumstances he would think it proper to do; when he may talk about himself, and tell his own experiences, in fact, indulge in a more or less egotistic monologue without fear or reproach.

I think I may claim that this is one of those occasions.  I have delivered my last anatomical lecture and heard my class recite for the last time.  They wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic mood than that in which they have known me.  Will you not indulge me in telling you something of my own story?

This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in which I have taken my place and performed my duties as Professor of Anatomy.  For more than half of my term of office I gave instruction in Physiology, after the fashion of my predecessors and in the manner then generally prevalent in our schools, where the physiological laboratory was not a necessary part of the apparatus of instruction.  It was with my hearty approval that the teaching of Physiology was constituted a separate department and made an independent Professorship.  Before my time, Dr. Warren had taught Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery in the same course of Lectures, lasting only three or four months.  As the boundaries of science are enlarged, new divisions and subdivisions of its territories become necessary.  In the place of six Professors in 1847, when I first became a member of the Faculty, I count twelve upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the whole number engaged in the work of instruction in the Medical School amounts to no less than fifty.

Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of science has undergone a very remarkable transformation.  Chemistry and Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the instructors of that time.  We are looking forward to the synthesis of new organic compounds; our artificial madder is already in the market, and the indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will be supplanted by the manufactured article.  In the living body we talk of fuel supplied and work done, in movement, in heat, just as if we were dealing with a machine of our own contrivance.