them rarely. It is not often that an opinion is worth expressing,
which cannot take care of itself. Opposition is the best mordant to fix
the color of your thought in the general belief.

It is time to bring these crowded remarks to a close. The day has been
when at the beginning of a course of Lectures I should have thought it
fitting to exhort you to diligence and entire devotion to your tasks
as students. It is not so now. The young man who has not heard the
clarion-voices of honor and of duty now sounding throughout the land,
will heed no word of mine. In the camp or the city, in the field or the
hospital, under sheltering roof, or half-protecting canvas, or open
sky, shedding our own blood or stanching that of our wounded defenders,
students or teachers, whatever our calling and our ability, we belong,
not to ourselves, but to our imperilled country, whose danger is our
calamity, whose ruin would be our enslavement, whose rescue shall be our
earthly salvation!

SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING.

An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
University, November 6, 1867.

The idea is entertained by some of our most sincere professional
brethren, that to lengthen and multiply our Winter Lectures will be
of necessity to advance the cause of medical education. It is a fair
subject for consideration whether they do not overrate the relative
importance of that particular mode of instruction which forms the larger
part of these courses.

As this School could only lengthen its lecture term at the expense
of its "Summer Session," in which more direct, personal, and familiar
teaching takes the place of our academic discourses, and in which more
time can be given to hospitals, infirmaries, and practical instruction
in various important specialties, whatever might be gained, a good deal
would certainly be lost in our case by the exchange.

The most essential part of a student's instruction is obtained, as I
believe, not in the lecture-room, but at the bedside. Nothing seen there
is lost; the rhythms of disease are learned by frequent repetition; its
unforeseen occurrences stamp themselves indelibly in the memory. Before
the student is aware of what he has acquired, he has learned the aspects
and course and probable issue of the diseases he has seen with his
teacher, and the proper mode of dealing with them, so far as his master
knows it. On the other hand, our ex cathedra prelections have a s