Page:The Harveian oration ; delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, June 26th, 1879 (IA b24976465).pdf/14

 express a hope that the other sex, when they have entered the portals of the profession, will rise out of the narrow sphere to which their best friends have consigned them, and by the display of a superior intelligence, convince a wise legislature, which has seen fit to grant them the privilege of practising medicine, of their capability of also giving a vote in the election of their supporters in Parliament.

Harvey says that we must always be acquiring knowledge, and surely the medical man, with his fellow-creatures before him presenting various states of organic and functional derangement, has problems relating to the working of the complex machinery of the human body, ever awaiting his solution. He, rather than any other member of the community, can appropriate to himself the words of the Latin poet-

It is true that a knowledge of the structure and functions of the human body ought to precede that of its derangements, and, as a matter of instruction and discipline, we do so place it, but in our present state of comparative ignorance the