Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/175

Rh 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 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 position until medicine is as free as religion.

To this it must come. To this the public, which will decide for itself, has determined it shall come. To this the public has, in fact, brought it, but on a plan which it is not desirable to make permanent. We will be as free to take care of our bodies as of our souls and of our goods. This is the profession of all who sign as I do, and the practice of most of those who would not like the name

The author had published, in 1803, a 'Defence of the Divine System,' which I never saw; also, 'On the inverted scheme of Copernicus. The above work is clever in its satire.

These are two broadsides of August and November, 1826, signed by Robert Taylor, A.B., Orator of the Christian Evidence