Page:The Harveian oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians June 26, 1889 (IA b22361285).pdf/40

 scientific medicine, will secure to himself a source of never-failing enjoyment.

It may, indeed, be regarded as a great privilege to be allowed to work, with however little success, in this beautiful field of inquiry, where from time to time the veil which hides so much from us seems failing in its office; where truth (as it often does when half concealed) assumes an ever-varying form, playing with thought, and pleasing fancy, even when tempting us far from the paths of discovery.

It must have been a great source of happiness to Harvey, when, as the historian says, he 'lost his practice’ and ‘was thought crack-brained,’ that he had left him the purest and highest of all pleasures, the appreciative contemplation of a subject rich in wonders and fertile in great results.

It would appear, and more especially so from the passages I have quoted from Cullen, that the dread of a new system of treatment had much to do “with the success of Harvey’s detractors in depriving him of practice. The public would naturally regard with anxiety the advent of a new therapeutical era having an experimental character which the profession generally considered incon-