Page:The Hunterian oration, for the year 1819.djvu/25

Rh and that bodies for dissection should be liberally supplied. By these means, he produced such a spirit of enquiry and emulation amongst the members of our profession, that the French surgeons soon surpassed those of all other nations, and pupils from every part of Europe flocked to Paris to learn anatomy and surgery. As a further consequence of this patronage, I may mention that it gave rise to that very excellent work, the Memoirs of the French Academy of Surgery, the contributors to which were laborious students of their profession, who regularly registered and arranged all the knowledge promulgated by preceding authors, to which they added their own observations and experimental enquiries.

It would, in my opinion, be honourable to the surgeons of any nation to combine and produce a rival work (due allowances being made for the progressive improvement of the science of surgery); for to me, these memoirs seem, even at present, to stand as it were alone, and in a state of lofty superiority. Let me not, however, omit to mention that before these memoirs came