Dr. Thomas Bond, the Physician of the Philosophical Society established by Franklin, to whom this letter was written, was also one of Franklin's lifelong friends. He was the Doctor Bond, who found that he could make no headway with his hospital project until it was encouraged by a _ca ira_ from Franklin, something like that which he is said to have uttered many years afterwards in France when the issue of the American Revolution was uncertain. For the society of physicians and liberal-minded clergymen Franklin had a peculiar partiality. To the one class he was attracted by both the scientific and humanitarian nature of their profession, to say nothing of the incessant intercourse with their fellow creatures, which makes all physicians more or less men of the world; and to the questioning spirit of the eighteenth century he was too true not to have a natural affinity for clergymen of the latitudinarian type. The ties between Dr. Thomas Bond, Dr. John Bard and Dr. Benjamin Rush and himself were very close. He had such a high opinion of Dr. Bond's pills that on one occasion he even writes to his wife from Virginia to send him some by post. On another occasion, when he was in England, he tells Deborah to thank Dr. Bond for the care that he takes of her. In a letter to the Doctor himself, he remarks that he did not know why their school of physic in Philadelphia should not soon be equal to that in Edinburgh, an observation which seemed natural enough to later Philadelphians when it was not only considered throughout the United States a high compliment to say of a man that he was as clever as a Philadelphia lawyer, but a medical education was in a large part of the United States deemed incomplete unless it had received the finishing touch from the clinics of that city. When Dr. John Bard removed to New York, where he became the first President of the New York Medical Society, Franklin stated in a letter to Cadwallader Colden that he esteemed Dr. Bard an ingenious physician and surgeon, and a discreet, worthy and honest man. In a letter to Dr. Bard and his wife in 1785, he used these tender words: "You are right in supposing, that I interest myself in everything that affects you and yours, sympathizing in your afflictions, and rejoicing in your felicities; for our friendship is ancient, and was never obscured by the least cloud."