Page:The Thruston speech on the progress of medicine 1880.djvu/11

7 other in its anxiety to contribute, as the result of labours, good to the world at large.

In attempting to sketch some few of those points which appear to us to mark the progress of medicine during the past three or four hundred years, an ample margin must be allowed, solely on the grounds of the magnitude of such advance, which, to say the least, has rescued an art based upon the truest scientific principles from the hands of the most ignorant empirics, and placed it on a pedestal which demands for its perfect and complete construction, a large acquaintance with those sister studies so necessary to a thorough appreciation of the science of medicine.

We are at the very onset of our inquiry met with this difficulty, that in medicine we are perforce called to look upon progress as being almost synonymous with extinction, or perhaps better with prevention; thus, in studying the history of medicine, we are at once struck by the fact, that some of the happiest results which can be brought forward as instances of evolution towards a