urrent--in a large quantity
of the physiological teaching, the results of which come before
examiners. And it becomes a very interesting question to know how all
this comes about, and in what way it can be remedied. How it comes
about will be perfectly obvious to any one who has considered the
growth of medicine. I suppose that medicine and surgery first began
by some savage, more intelligent than the rest, discovering that a
certain herb was good for a certain pain, and that a certain pull,
somehow or other, set a dislocated joint right. I suppose all things
had their humble beginnings, and medicine and surgery were in the same
condition. People who wear watches know nothing about watchmaking. A
watch goes wrong and it stops; you see the owner giving it a shake,
or, if he is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance-wheel
a turn. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, and you know what are
the results upon the watch. I should think you can divine what are the
results of analogous operations upon the human body. And because men
of sense very soon found that such were the effects of meddling with
very complicated machinery they did not understand, I suppose the
first thing, as being the easiest, was to study the nature of the
works of the human watch, and the next thing was to study the way the
parts worked together, and the way the watch worked. Thus, by degrees,
we have had growing up our body of anatomists, or knowers of the
construction of the human watch, and our physiologists, who know how
the machine works. And just as any sensible man, who has a valuable
watch, does not meddle with it himself, but goes to some one who has
studied watchmaking, and understands what the effect of doing this
or that may be; so, I suppose, the man who, having charge of that
valuable machine, his own body, wants to have it kept in good order,
comes to a professor of the medical art for the purpose of having it
set right, believing that, by deduction from the facts of structure
and from the facts of function, the physician will divine what may be
the matter with his bodily watch at that particular time, and what may
be the best means of setting it right. If that may be taken as a
just representation of the relation of the theoretical branches of
medicine--what we may call the institutes of medicine, to use an old
term--to the practical branches, I think it will be obvious to you
that they are of prime and fundamental importance