Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/12

 restore the sick, and which distil poisonous vapors; he that distinguishes the wholesome from the noxious plant; that discovers the virtues that lie hidden in the mineral, and extracts from it and from organic products the weapons with which he banishes suffering and triumphs over death. It is the physician whose investigations reveal the marvels of the animal structure, amazing even when it lies lifeless before him, putting to shame the utmost ingenuity of human mechanism; it is he who displays it in action, at every step and in every act of life performing miracles, converting bread and water into flesh and blood, and making of the air we breathe a consuming fire; it is he that by the skill which science gives him renders safe the often perilous voyage of the infant to the light of day, and guards the tender stranger from the earliest dangers of life. And what shall I say of the almost infinite field which is the province of medicine and surgery? of the science of disease as it reveals itself in the changes of function and structure? which treats of the wreck and ravages that disease leaves behind it, and which renders intelligible the causes of the catastrophe? of the voices of the suffering organs which, though inarticulate, are none the less significant to the skilful ear? of the visible deformities, distortions, displacements, and mutilations which, as well as diseases, mar the symmetry and hinder the uses of the body? Or shall I speak of the physician no longer as a naturalist or a pathologist, but as a man, whose moral, not less than his intellectual nature, must be exercised in his calling? What are drugs and what are ingenious instruments but so many material agents, essential, perhaps, for the cure of the sick; but what is their power, when used alone, compared with that they display when vivified and potentialized by the spirit of humanity guiding a keen insight into the secret places of the heart? Hope is often no less enlivening than the most stimulating elixir; sympathy no less soothing than the gentlest anodyne; counsel no less strengthening than the most powerful tonic; and often nature, sustained and cheered by these moral influences, triumphs over obstacles which no mere medicinal assistance would have enabled her to surmount.