Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/477

 476 Southern Historical Society Papers.

venge for the death of a man who was at once the terror and the admiration of the corps. Nothing was too desperate for him to dare, we heard ; and one of his comrades remarked : "In liquor, old Belzebub himself couldn't head John Miller." But the gallant man who rid the world of such a wretch, lives still, for aught I know, in prosperous security, and John Miller's ghost was never laid. It lingers yet in the cold shadows of that ruined house on Haw river.

C. D. M.

The Medical Profession in the War. By CLAUDIUS H. MASTIN, M. D., of Mobile, Alabama.

[Extract from an address delivered at the University of Pennsylvania March i2th, 1874.]


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With the lengthening of the session in 1847 the classes had grad- ually increased in numbers until the winter of 1859-60, at which time the register of matriculates marks the greatest number of students which had ever before attended the Medical Department of the University.

The school may then be said to have reached the highest point in the history of her prosperity, and everything seemed to foreshadow a bright future. With a reputation which was annually drawing to her classes large numbers of students from all sections of the Union, and in the keeping of a faculty, which was of established character and position, there seemed to be no cause to forebode calamity, or even diminished usefulness.

Unfortunately, just at this point in our history came that terrible convulsion which made countless thousands reel in agony and the bloody sweat of anguish. In the midst of a prosperity unequaled in the annals of our race, the great political storm which, from the first days of the Republic, had been slowly gathering on the horizon of the nation's happiness, culminated with gigantic force and burst forth with resistless iury.

The numbers of Southern students, who for many years had sought the rich treasures of learning to be found in the various med ical schools of the North, had no choice but to turn their faces Southward. They could do no otherwise, nor were they to be cen- sured. Actuated by an impulse natural in the heart of man the love of home and fired by all the enthusiasm of youth, it would