Page:Biographical Memoir of Samuel George Morton - George Bacon Wood.djvu/15

 a never-ceasing strain of grateful emotion, that mingled sweetly with the toils, anxieties, and successes of his professional career, and gave an otherwise unattainable charm to his intervals of leisure.

It is reasonable to suppose that his professional business was increased by his marriage. That he possessed, in some measure, the confidence of the public as a practitioner, is shown by his appointment, in the year 1829, as one of the physicians to the Philadelphia Almshouse Hospital. Here he enjoyed ample opportunities for pathological investigations, of which he availed himself extensively, especially in relation to diseases of the chest, towards which his attention had been particularly directed by attendance on the clinical instructions of Laennec, during his stay in Paris. The fruit of these investigations will be seen in a work which will be more particularly noticed directly.

In the year 1830, Dr. Morton added to his other duties those of a medical teacher. A brief notice of the association with which he was connected may not be amiss; as it was one of the first of those organizations, now familiar to the profession in Philadelphia, in which a number of physicians unite in order to extend to their private pupils advantages, which, separately, it would be impossible for them to bestow. It is quite unnecessary that I should speak of the benefits which have accrued from this plan of instruction to the profession in this city. Most of those who now hear me have, I presume, been taught under that system, and some are at this moment teachers. You can, therefore, appreciate its advantages; but it is only the older among you who can do so fully, as it is only they who can compare it with the irregular and inefficient plan of private tuition that preceded it. Another incidental advantage has been the training of a body of lecturers, from among whom the incorporated schools have been able to fill their vacant professorial chairs with tried and efficient men, and thus to sustain, amidst great competition, the old pre-eminence of Philadelphia as the seat of medical instruction.

The late Dr. Joseph Parrish, from the increasing number of his office pupils, was induced to engage the services of a number of young medical men, to aid him, by lectures and examinations on the different branches of medicine, in the education of his class. This arrangement was in efficient operation for several years, but was at