erable beneficent future medical reforms.

I cannot help believing that medical curative treatment will by and
by resolve itself in great measure into modifications of the food,
swallowed and breathed, and of the natural stimuli, and that less will
be expected from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, either alien
or assimilable. The noted mineral-waters containing iron, sulphur,
carbonic acid, supply nutritious or stimulating materials to the body
as much as phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to the cereal
plants. The effects of a milk and vegetable diet, of gluten bread
in diabetes, of cod-liver oil in phthisis, even of such audacious
innovations as the water-cure and the grape-cure, are only hints of
what will be accomplished when we have learned to discover what organic
elements are deficient or in excess in a case of chronic disease,
and the best way of correcting the abnormal condition, just as an
agriculturist ascertains the wants of his crops and modifies the
composition of his soil. In acute febrile diseases we have long ago
discovered that far above all drug-medication is the use of mild liquid
diet in the period of excitement, and of stimulant and nutritious food
in that of exhaustion. Hippocrates himself was as particular about his
barley-ptisan as any Florence Nightingale of our time could be.

The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession,
belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction
of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that
makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians?
His prescriptions consisted principally of simples. An aperient or an
opiate, a "cardiac" or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of
a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. It was not by his
pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name. It was
by daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on
horseback for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and
the noxious and often loathsome rubbish 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 fe