Page:The Harveian oration 1866.djvu/23

 because he was so exclusively a "practical man." He derived no aid from physiology, and sought none from it. He considered that the province of the physician was "to cure disease, and to do naught else" (h). He not only rejected the flimsy doctrines of his time; but he seems to have had little regard for the actual facts of physiology, and no faith in its future. The circulation of the blood was the great new fact of his age; yet in all his works he refers to it only once or twice, and then cursorily and not very aptly. "What microscope," he exclaimed, "shall exhibit those ducts, through which the blood, conducted by the arteries, is passed onwards to the orifices of the veins?" (k) Which same ducts were actually exhibited under a microscope very few years after his words were written. In all his works I have found post-mortem appearances noticed only twice, and then without the exactness, which is so characteristic of his description of symptoms. He looked for the advancement of medicine only in minute observation of the living phenomena of disease, and in attentively watching the effects of remedies and external circumstances; yet, studying these 'by way of experiment,' he accomplished a great reform in the