y vegetable or other thing that is vertuous
in the way of Physick.

"There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way,
namely that our young students in Physick may be trained up better then
they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to
fall to practise before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or duely trained
up in making experiments, for we never had but one Anatomy in the
countrey, which Mr. Giles Firman [Firmin] now in England, did make and
read upon very well, but no more of that now."

Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the hearts
of our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges where
medicine is taught in all its branches. Mr. Giles Firmin's "Anatomy" may
be considered the first ancestor of a long line of skeletons which have
been dangling and rattling in our lecture-rooms for more than a century.

Teaching in New England in 1647 was a grave but simple matter. A single
person, combining in many cases, as in that of Mr. Giles Firmin,
the offices of physician and preacher, taught what he knew to a few
disciples whom he gathered about him. Of the making of that "Anatomy" on
which my first predecessor in the branch I teach "did read very well"
we can know nothing. The body of some poor wretch who had swung upon the
gallows, was probably conveyed by night to some lonely dwelling at the
outskirts of the village, and there by the light of flaring torches
hastily dissected by hands that trembled over the unwonted task.
And ever and anon the master turned to his book, as he laid bare the
mysteries of the hidden organs; to his precious Vesalius, it might be,
or his figures repeated in the multifarious volume of Ambroise Pare; to
the Aldine octavo in which Fallopius recorded his fresh observations; or
that giant folio of Spigelius just issued from the press of Amsterdam,
in which lovely ladies display their viscera with a coquettish grace
implying that it is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show the
lace-like omentum, and hold up their appendices epiploicae as if they
were saying "these are our jewels."

His teaching of medicine was no doubt chiefly clinical, and received
with the same kind of faith as that which accepted his words from the
pulpit. His notions of disease were based on what he had observed, seen
always in the light of the traditional doctrines in which he was bred.
His discourse savored of the weighty doctrines of Hippocrates,