Page:The Hunterian Oration, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons ... February 14, 1817 (IA b22009358).pdf/36

28 opportunities to the students of witnessing the effects of disease, and of benefitting by those instructions which they were now enabled to comprehend. Every inducement of independence, of honour, and of rank in society, being held out to the cultivators of natural knowledge, the native vigorous minds of free Britons soon became apparent in the improvement of every science; and of none more than of our own. It is allowed that all circumstances were peculiarly favourable. In Cowper, Cheselden, Douglas, and Nichols, Anatomy and Surgery had zealous and accomplished teachers, whose fame extended over Europe. The celebrity of Cheselden as the most expert operator of his day, was universally admitted ; and being one of the surgeons of St. Thomas’s Hospital, he had constant �