Page:Anon 1830 Remarks on some proposed alterations in the course of medical education.djvu/10

 of sanity dream that any competent surgeon could not take up an artery, cut off a limb, or reduce a dislocation, and teach others to do so, without knowing the Alpha and Omega of the Greek? Do our innovators fancy that the doctrines of the Greek verbs, and the subtleties of the Greek prepositions, or that the complexities of the Aristotelian philosophy, are necessary to the elucidation and advancement even of Physiology a fortiori of the tactus or visits eruditus of the practitioner? Do they imagine that Belles Lettres and Euclid unravelled the difficulties which opposed themselves to, or called into existence the beneficent boon of the illustrious ? Do they suppose that, acute and elegant scholar as he was, tortured his brain with literary enigmas, when he was distinguishing and prescribing for incipient phthisis? Ask a patient racked with the agony of ischuria, whether he will select for his relief a discourse held in Greek on the unities, and on the stoical sophism of pain and pleasure, or will he prefer the skilfulskillful [sic] introduction of the catheter? Ask another, burning in the furnace of syphilis, whether he will choose a luminous exposition of the Solar System, and a profound disquisition on the laws of matter, rather than the resources of mercury and sarsaparilla? Will it not be granted, that any one profession demands all the energy and talent that one man can be supposed to possess, to confer a just and