of
our own honored ex-professors, who studied under him, whether Dr. Rush
had ever learned the meaning of that saying of Lord Bacon, that man
is the minister and interpreter of Nature, or whether he did not speak
habitually of Nature as an intruder in the sick room, from which his art
was to expel her as an incompetent and a meddler.

All a man's powers are not too much for such a profession as Medicine.
"He is a learned man," said old Parson Emmons of Franklin, "who
understands one subject, and he is a very learned man who understands
two subjects." Schonbein says he has been studying oxygen for thirty
years. Mitscherlich said it took fourteen years to establish a new fact
in chemistry. Aubrey says of Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation,
that "though all his profession would allow him to be an excellent
anatomist, I have never heard of any who admired his therapeutic
way." My learned and excellent friend before referred to, Dr. Brown
of Edinburgh, from whose very lively and sensible Essay, "Locke and
Sydenham," I have borrowed several of my citations, contrasts Sir
Charles Bell, the discoverer, the man of science, with Dr. Abercrombie,
the master in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. It is through one
of the rarest of combinations that we have in our Faculty a teacher
on whom the scientific mantle of Bell has fallen, and who yet stands
preeminent in the practical treatment of the class of diseases which
his inventive and ardent experimental genius has illustrated. M.
Brown-Sequard's example is as, eloquent as his teaching in proof of
the advantages of well directed scientific investigation. But those who
emulate his success at once as a discoverer and a practitioner must be
content like him to limit their field of practice. The highest genius
cannot afford in our time to forget the ancient precept, Divide et
impera.

"I suppose I must go and earn this guinea," said a medical man who was
sent for while he was dissecting an animal. I should not have cared to
be his patient. His dissection would do me no good, and his thoughts
would be too much upon it. I want a whole man for my doctor, not a half
one. I would have sent for a humbler practitioner, who would have given
himself entirely to me, and told the other--who was no less a man than
John Hunter--to go on and finish the dissection of his tiger.

Sydenham's "Read Don Quixote" should be addressed not to the student,
but to the Professor of today. Aimed at