The study of medicine is so great and comprehensive a field that within its horizon we find included the whole moral world. It comprises mankind in all its conditions, in all its changes of opinions and in all its modes of society. It has been subject to the highest wisdom in existence, to the greatest folly and mysticism which superstition could produce and, in our days, to the most profound learning and scientific speculation. And though I am now addressing a miscellaneous audience of which only a few are physicians or students of medicine, every one is in some way connected with the profession, be it only as a patient. Every one receives this liability as an inheritance from nature and, therefore, ought to be interested in a science which occupies itself with mankind. The only motives that this profession permits to its votaries are the clear and decided conviction of an inborn taste and talent for the practice of medicine and an earnest desire for, and love of, scientific investigations concerning the human being--its construction, its condition of health and disease, and all its relations with the surrounding world. It is a positive fact, acknowledged among all nations and at all times, that there is in the mass a growth of the human mind from generation to generation similar to that in the different periods of individual existence. And to these varying stages of mental growth we must ascribe the different forms through which the practice of medicine has passed. Disease is as old as mankind. The first sore finger made the first patient, and the first physician was the one who bound it up or who inquired how it was doing. Pain awakens the instinct to relieve, one following the other, and this must have existed from the creation of mankind. The practice of medicine dates back, therefore, to the morning of life; the shadows of a hoary antiquity gather around its cradle. The annals of history do not reach back of it, but only open the portals of fable in whose shadowy domain it is supposed to dwell. Æsculapius was the grandson of Zeus, whose father was Time himself. Gradually we see it emerging from this hazy atmosphere in the form of a mysterious science, assisted and appropriated by the mysticism of the oracles and astrologers, until it found its devotees in the priesthood who pursued the practice upon the body in connection with their duties as priests for the soul. It is only since medicine has ceased to stand isolated from the other sciences that the erroneous belief that disease was produced by supernatural agency has waned. Nothing has more retarded the progress of medicine in becoming really scientific than its separation from general learning; and nothing could favor empiricism and superstition more than the promotion of this separation.