Page:The Hunterian Oration for 1850.djvu/60

 pital, however noble, what is the value of its concentrated wealth and power, and all its complicated machinery of good, if we withhold from it, the active agency of our profession? The medical mind is to a hospital, what life is to the body—the spirit of religion, to the mere edifice in which its practice and its doctrines are enforced! It gives to it all its utility, and all its rank. It stamps it with its high name. It infuses a spirit of life into the inanimate and otherwise all but worthless body; and in vitalising the vast machine, it becomes in an instant, the instrument of incalculable good to thousands, the pride of virtue, the boast of the world!