Page:The Hunterian oration, for the year 1819.djvu/35

Rh ated by violence; for ensuring their unvarying motionless position, so essential to their tranquillity and re-union; for suggesting and applying suitable means to soothe or correct the morbid actions of susceptible surfaces; for discriminating the great variety of external local diseases; and for performing the various and complicated operations of surgery; that it requires the whole time and ability of any individual to attain even moderate perfection in this department of medical science. Whilst the no less extensive and important task of unravelling the intricacies of the symptoms produced by internal diseases, so as to trace them to their several sources, and consequently to decide upon their proper treatment; and of modifying the remedies employed, so as to adapt them to the varieties of circumstances and constitutions; equally demands the concentrated observation and reflection of the physician. Indeed the division of medicine into two principal departments, which custom has established, seems also to have received the fullest sanction of experience; and if we were not to acquiesce in it, we should subvert the institutions of society.