Page:The Hunterian Oration for 1850.djvu/14

x vendor, having, like the surgeon, no claims to medical knowledge, quoad the treatment of disease, as may be inferred from the following lines from Dryden:—


 * “Physicians from the tree have found the bark,
 * They laboring for relief of human kind,
 * With sharpened sight some remedies may find,
 * The apothecary-train are wholly blind.”

13th Epistle.

While Pope, in a letter to his friend Allen, says, “Physicians” (that is, medical men) “are among the most agreeable companions, the best friends, and the most learned men I know.” Am I not justified in assuming, then, that, taking our profession as a whole, the entire body is degenerate from its former eminence?

It may be also objected that I have travelled out of my subject, by addressing myself to that of the profession of the law. My purpose was not to depreciate the law, but to contrast with it, the more useful, and, as I conceive, the higher calling of the profession of medicine. The profession of the law appeared to me a fair and legitimate subject of comparison with our own, and I