Dr. George B. Wood once declared that "He who enters the medical profession with a mercenary spirit, will almost necessarily come short of its highest requirements. Aiming at the appearance, rather than the reality of skill, he will think more of the impression he may make on others, than of a proper understanding and treatment of the disease. When nothing is to be gained but the consciousness of duty fulfilled, he will be little apt to spend time and labor which might yield him more if applied elsewhere, or at least would be abstracted from his pleasures. For the frequent self-deuial, the steady devotion of thought and energy, the unwavering guard over his precious charge, as well when unseen as when seen of men, which characterize the right spirited practitioner, he has no sufficient inducement. He will be, almost necessarily, more or less superficial. He never can be the true model physician. Just in proportion as medicine is cultivated in the mercenary, or in the pure professional spirit, will be its decay or advancement in efficiency, zeal, dignity and acceptance with God and man. * * Get the true professional spirit, and all that is needful or desirable will be added unto it."

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The English Hippocrates, Sydenham, used to say: I have thought it a greater happiness to discover a certain method of curing the slightest disease, than to accumulate the largest fortune." And the illustrious Dr. Fothergill once said: "My only wish was to do what little business might fall to my share as well as possible, and to banish all thoughts of practicing physic as a money-getting trade, with the same solicitude as I would the suggestions of vice or intemperance. * * * I endeavor to follow my business because it is my duty, rather than my interest; the last is inseparable from a just discharge of duty." Lord Bacon has said "that every man is a debtor to his profession, from the which, as men do of course seek

to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves, by way of amends, to be a help and ornament thereunto." Our code makes the same acknowledgement in the paragraph which declares that "Every individual, on entering the profession, as he becomes thereby entitled to all its privileges and immuni ties, incurs an obligation to the extent of his best abilities to maintain its dignity and honor, to exalt its standing, and to extend the bounds of its usefulness;" and further on enjoins that he "should, by unwearied diligence, resort to every honorable means of enriching the science."

Now, gentlemen, let us ask ourselves the question direct, and let each answer it honestly for himself, whether during the year just closed, he thinks he has been perfectly imbued with the "pure professional spirit," or whether he does not think we all yet have rather too much of the "mercenary sort." Have we always attended our society meetings, when it was possible? Have we always prepared ourselves as thoroughly as we could for our debates? Have we always done what we could in the way of prepared papers, and written records of cases to be read before our society? Have we, in every instance possible, demanded and held a post mortem, when we had a fatal case? Have we taken advantage of the opportunities we have had of cultivating anatomical science, the very groundwork of our profession? Have we all kept case books, and carefully recorded the progress and results of each case in our practice? Have we kept as many journals on our tables as we could afford to take and had time to read, and purchased every new work, the perusal of which was necessary to keep us abreast in the present rapid march of our profession? Have we provided ourselves with all instruments which the exigencies of our profession and the urgency of certain cases which are liable to fall into our hands at any day, will not give us

time to send abroad for, when the occasion arises for their use, and the want of which, under certain circumstances, might make us morally criminal, on the death of a fellowbeing? And have we always kept ourselves so pure and unspotted from the world or quackery that, by a refusal of private social recognition of its practitioners, we take away from the public all occasion of confounding them with us? To make application of an expression of St. Paul, "Have we all done what we could to magnify our profession?"

But methinks I hear some one present say, We have no time for most of these things; the toils of our practice, and the domestic duties-with those of us having families-so engross our time as to leave us insufficient leisure for the cultivation of medicine as a science. Besides, some of us are growing old, and we must leave everything of that sort to the younger generation, following after.

But I would ask any so objecting, to think for a few moments, and tell me, if he can, of any great work which we acknowledge as of much authority in our profession, which has not been prepared amid just such, or more onerous duties than any by which the busiest of us is now harassed. Let him reflect that some of the most valuable of all the works for which to-day our profession is indebted to Sir Astley Cooper, were composed in the midst of one of the largest private practices of any man who ever lived, and at the time, too, when he was an hospital surgeon, and daily lecturer in a medical school. Let him look at those eighteen volumes of Gerard Van Swieten's "Commentaries on Boerhaave," the great text-book of the medical world a century ago, and recollect that they were written by the court physician of Joseph II, in the midst of one of the heaviest and most responsible of private practices, and that he still found time to orig

inate a medical school, give clinical lectures, create a botanical garden, and to exert his influence sufficiently to found a university. Let him read the lives of Boerhaave and Haller and Hoffman, the bare titles of the latter of whose works fill thirty-eight quarto pages, and see if they had learned leisure in which to do nothing else than write. Does not every one know that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote those immortal records which all acknowledge as the foundation of our science while engaged in what must have been almost constant practical professional engagements. Or let him come down to the present year and hour, and know that the living, shining lights of our own day and generation, are also the busiest privately occupied. Let him know that Sir Thomas Watson, and George B. Wood, and Austin Flint, and Sir William Ferguson, and Erichsen, and Gross, and Sir James Y. Simpson, and Hodge, and Meigs, each wrote the works which we, and generations after us shall be indebted to them for, while busier than the busiest of us in this presence. No, gentlemen, when we recollect that Dr. John Mason Good found time to translate Lucretius' "De Natura Rerum," with his book in hand as he drove or walked his daily rounds, engaged in one of the largest practices in London; and when we read in the preface to Dr. Willis' Biography of Harvey, together with a complete translation of his works from the Latin, what he says in speaking of the biographical part: "This portion of my work I have only achieved with an effort, and at something like disadvantage. Incessantly engaged by night and by day in the laborious and responsible duties of a country practice, enjoying nothing of learned leisure, but snatching from the hours that should rightfully be given to rest, the time that was necessary to composition, remote, too, from means of information which I must nevertheless send for and consult"-recalling these, and

an hundred similar examples if we might, for one, I think that there is not one of us but should feel humiliated when reflecting on our wasted time, time which we have. let slip from us, never, nevermore to be repossessed.

But, I imagine I again hear it objected, that we are but unpretentious country doctors, not aspiring to lead the profession, and even if we were all aflame with ambitious hopes to do so, that our narrow sphere would make their realization an impossibility, that the village doctor, must from the very nature of things, ever be the passive follower of the hospital physician of the city.

But, I would answer, gentlemen, that this is not the point. I am not speaking of ambition, though if we each had a little more of it in us, it would probably be better for ourselves and our patients; the question is one regarding the fulfillment of that injunction of that code which says that we are morally bound to exalt the standing of our profession, and by "unwearied diligence, resort to every honorable means of enriching the science." Because the hospital presents a wider and more easily cultivated field than ours, does it follow that ours must be totally barren? No, the material in each case is just the same, poor suffering humanity, and while the concentration of large numbers of sick within a small space, and the regulations of hospitals, are such that the observer can study disease more readily, have his directions carried out more effectually, and record and tabulate the results more easily, yet the antecedents, the surroundings, and the very concentration of patients within eleemosynary institutions, are so different from those of the patients of private life, that the uncorrected conclusions of experience drawn from the former source alone, are not perfectly applicable in every respect to those whom we attend.

I cannot recollect any evidence that either Hippocrates