s own children to the new process of
vaccination,--the first persons vaccinated, as Dr. Zabdiel Boylston's
son had been the first person inoculated in the New World.

A little before the first half of this century was completed, in the
autumn of 1846, the great discovery went forth from the Massachusetts
General Hospital, which repaid the debt of America to the science of the
Old World, and gave immortality to the place of its origin in the memory
and the heart of mankind. The production of temporary insensibility at
will--tuto, cito, jucunde, safely, quickly, pleasantly--is one of those
triumphs over the infirmities of our mortal condition which change the
aspect of life ever afterwards. Rhetoric can add nothing to its glory;
gratitude, and the pride permitted to human weakness, that our Bethlehem
should have been chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the
divine mercy, are all we can yet find room for.

The present century has seen the establishment of all those great
charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of the
mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as among the
chief ornaments of their civilization.

The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of
medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease)
and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies); but
their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored
in their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past,
their memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient
old dry-nurse, whose "blackdrop" is the never-failing anodyne of
the restless generations of men. Except the lively controversy on
inoculation, and floating papers in journals, we have not much of value
for that long period, in the shape of medical records.

But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to
mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find. Of
these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.

Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical School
of our University, did a great work for the advancement of medicine and
surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and author, greater,
it is claimed by some, than was ever done by any other man. The two
Warrens, of our time, each left a large and permanent r