home or foreign. Let it be competent to any
man to describe himself as qualified by study in public schools without a
diploma, or by private study, or even by intuition or divine inspiration,
if he please. But whatever he holds his qualification to be, that let him
declare. Let all qualification {269} which of its own nature admits of
proof be proved, as by the diploma or certificate, &c., leaving things
which cannot be proved, as asserted private study, intuition, inspiration,
&c., to work their own way.

"Let it be highly penal to assert to the patient any qualification which is
not in the register, and let the register be sold very cheap. Let the
registrar give each registered practitioner a copy of the register in his
own case; let any patient have the power to demand a sight of this copy;
and let no money for attendance be recoverable in any case in which there
has been false representation.

"Let any party in any suit have a right to produce what medical testimony
he pleases. Let the medical witness produce his register, and let his
evidence be for the jury, as is that of an engineer or a practitioner of
any art which is not attested by diplomas.

"Let any man who practises without venturing to put his name on the
register be liable to fine and imprisonment.

"The consequence would be that, as now, anybody who pleases might practise;
for the medical world is well aware that there is no power of preventing
what they call quacks from practising. But very different from what is now,
every man who practises would be obliged to tell the whole world what his
claim is, and would run a great risk if he dared to tell his patient in
private anything different from what he had told the whole world.

"The consequence would be that a real education in anatomy, physiology,
chemistry, surgery, and what is known of the thing called medicine, would
acquire more importance than it now has.

"It is curious to see how completely the medical man of the nineteenth
century squares with the priest of the sixteenth century. The clergy of all
sects are now better divines and better men than they ever were. They have
lost Bacon's reproach that they took a smaller measure of things than any
other educated men; and the physicians are now {270} in this particular the
rearguard of the learned world; though it may be true that the rear in our
day is further on in the march than the van of Bacon's day. Nor will they
ever recover the lost po