Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/164

 the medical officers should have one standing uniform in all regiments. This was a move in the right direction; but it was done, as usual, in a humiliating way! by stripping off their lace and facings and reducing their dress below the respectability of a staff sergeant. No soldier can be indifferent as to his dress. The French army can give us good examples in it.

The time was, when Divinity, Law and Physic stood on the same pedestal on the world's Acropolis; but the latter has been shuffled off into the streets. Yet an unprejudiced examination will show that their fortunes are in inverse ratio to their deserts. We have in these late days seen medicine confer the greatest blessings on suffering humanity that man can confer upon man; viz., surgical operation without pain, and parturition without consciousness, and we have seen the discoverer of that blessing still unhonoured beyond his profession; but we are not aware that law and divinity have made corresponding improvements: that the crooked path to justice has been made more straight, or that the morality of the world has made any remarkable advances. In the days of ancient Greece—in the days of Machaon, Hippocrates and Æsculapius, such men were treated as guardian angels, when pestilence was monthly decimating the population; they were raised to the highest honours when alive, and worshipped