Page:Recovery from the passage of an iron bar through the head.djvu/20

20 was opened, followed by a marked improvement in all the symptoms. The second was on the sixty-fourth day, at which time he was bled sixteen ounces.

I indulge the hope, that surely but little if anything was done to retard the progress of the ease, or to interfere with the natural recuperative powers. Nature is certainly greater than art. Some one has wisely said, that vain is learning without wit. So may we say, vain is art without nature. For what surgeon, the most skilful, with all the blandishments of his art, has the world ever known, who could presume to take one of his fellows who has had so formidable a missile hurled through his brain, with a crash, and bring him, without the aid of this vis conservatrix, so that, on the fifty-sixth day thereafter, he would have been walking in the streets again? I can only say, in conclusion, with good old Ambrose Paré, I dressed him, God healed him.