Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/26

26 of the blood was a beautiful addition to our knowledge of the ancient economy; but on a review of the practice of medicine before and since that epoch, I do not see any great amelioration which has been derived from that discovery" (Medical News, lxviii. 731). We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them. The knowledge may be more or less imperfect, but so far as it is accurate it is also true; but with rare exceptions our rationale or theory of the laws of those phenomena is inaccurate, is never complete, and is always provisional.

Of therapeutics we may say what has been said of the legislative powers in a State. We cannot assign definite and immutable limits to them, or lay down inflexible rules for their use. The treatment of every case of sickness must be determined ultimately for and by itself, tentatively by skilled men, and as their practical sagacity may determine, while they bear in mind that the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them.

But to pursue further this train of thought would be to rehearse the themes I discussed before you and others upon a different occasion, and I will, therefore, conclude with a thought or two which, coming from the old to the young, may possibly bear some fruit in your minds hereafter.

I have somewhere met with an old saw—"Mean it when you're doing it." It is really only a version of the ancient precept: "What thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might." This counsel is full of wisdom. Whether the thing to be done be great or small, it should be done with such earnest attention as will insure its being done thoroughly. And as the sum of a man's life work is made up of qualities or units of various magnitudes, it may be compared to a Mosaic in which innumerable fragments of divers sizes, forms, and colors are combined to make a consummate picture, so does every one's life tend to harmonious perfection only in so far as its individual elements of thought, word, and deed are fitly framed together to produce a harmonious and consistent whole, free from ugly gaps, foul blotches and discordant colors, or disproportioned parts. Each, even the minutest, portion should harmonize with the rest and contribute to the unity of the picture.

We, all of us, more or less fail to compose a harmonious picture of