Page:Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (ser 03 vol 05).djvu/62

lii "Well aware that no amount of professional training can countervail the want of a liberal and thorough preparatory education, he was ever a warm advocate of a higher standard of preliminary qualification, as well as of a more extended and comprehensive curriculum. Much, it is true, may be done by industry and conscientious devotion to supply the want; but after graduation the physician has ordinarily no control of his time, and it cannot be wholly retrieved. The greater part of mankind will not even make the effort to do so. With those, therefore, who have at heart the honor and usefulness of their profession, it has always been a cause of regret that so many obtain the Doctorate, "crammed," it may be, with knowledge purely professional, but without anything worthy of the name of scholarship, without any proper mental cultivation and discipline, and too often without the personal attributes—the mores benevoli—which should characterize the accomplished physician.

Most of the public writings of Dr. Wood are on matters connected with his profession—chemical reaction, the medicinal properties and therapeutical value of plants and inorganic substances, pharmaceutical formulæ, the laws of life, health, disease, and other exact and recondite subjects. The bias of his mathematical and logical mind was strongly toward scientific research. Originality and invention were not generally reckoned among his attributes. He was known to have "many a feat of high emprise and gentle deed essayed;" but few beyond his immediate circle suspected that he was also a votary of the Muses and an adventurer in the field of Fiction. The intellectual and the emotional are so different, and, in their highest development, so incompatible with each other, that excellence in both is rarely