Page:An Examination of Certain Charges - Alfred Stillé.djvu/21

 history of the school, when his lectures were to be compared with the eloquent discourses of Rush, and the animated and lucid demonstrations of Wistar—he was not then suspected either by the Trustees, Professors, or students, as incompetent!" The colleagues of the Ex-Professor, three years since, including at the time Dr. Physic and Dr. James, the contemporaries of Rush and Wistar, solemnly and unanimously declared in answer to an interrogatory addressed to them by the Trustees, that they held him incompetent to his office.

In every class returning to its second course, a large number constantly neglected to attend the lectures of Dr. Coxe, convinced they might with far more advantage employ their time in private study. Every class assembling for the first time, has borne from the remotest sections of the land, the undeviating sentiment of the incompetency of Dr. Coxe. "I attended" says a deponent, "the same lectures in 1823 and '24. The course of instruction was the same as it was this winter. The Professor at that time was highly unpopular, and a great many of the class seldom attended his lectures." Had he been competent, how could these things be? Lastly, Dr. Johnson, the celebrated editor of the London Medico-Chirurgical Review, in the number of that work for January, 1835, gives a notice of the inquiry of Dr. Coxe, into the claims of Harvey to the discovery of the circulation of the blood, in which he says: "Should our author ask us if we had perused his arguments, and the documents on which they are founded, we should candidly acknowledge that we did not read one-tenth part of them, and for this reason, that we think a great deal too much of precious time, and unquestionable erudition has already been expended on the writing of the book, therefore will we not increase the loss by reading it. If the discovery of the circulation has not, as Dr. Coxe asserts, been of any material use in the practice of physic and surgery, of what use can it be to shift the discovery itself from one man to another?" Again he says, considering the necessity of economizing time, "we cannot help deploring the waste of time and talent, the work before us has cost." "How, we ask Dr. Coxe, can he afford to throw away so many months and years upon researches that confessedly, can tend to no useful practical purpose whatever?" "We cannot conscientiously advise our junior brethren to study the fathers of physic, till after they have acquired all the knowledge immediate and collateral which the moderns have accumulated." These passages strongly tend to prove the class correct in the opinion they had formed of the Professor of Materia Medica. But the question recurs, was the class competent to judge? In one sense, no. Not as the artist is competent to judge of a painting, a watchmaker of a chronometer, or a physician of the prognosis of a disease. But as every man of common sense can perceive coarseness in the painting, neatness or awkwardness in the chronometer, and judges with instinctive accuracy of the approach of death, so the student, guided by a similar principle, with at least equal correctness may form a judgment of his teachers.

That man knows but little of human nature, who is ignorant, that the judgments so formed are found with few exceptions to be in accordance with the opinions of the world. But besides, the student has in the present case all the evidence just cited before him, and finding upon comparison with his own observation, however limited, how strictly it tallies, he is forced à priori to conclude, the coincidence is perfect. Not only so,