It was in the year 18-- that I completed my professional education in England, and decided upon spending in Paris the two years which had still to elapse, before my engagement with my guardians would require me to present myself for examination and approval at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The medical schools and hospitals of Paris were then, as now, famous for their men of science, and for the useful discoveries which clinical instruction--bedside ingenuity and industry--is morally certain to carry along with it. Whatever may be said of the French practitioners as a body--and my professional brethren, I know, bring against them, as a national reproach, the charge of inefficiency in the _treatment_ of disease, (remarkable for acuteness and truth as their _diagnosis_ is allowed to be)--still I think it will not be denied, that chiefly to the Parisian physicians, and to the untiring energy of particular individuals amongst them, whom it would not be difficult to name, are we indebted at this moment for some of the most important knowledge that we possess--knowledge, be it understood, derived altogether from investigations diligently pursued at the patient's bedside, and obtained with the greatest judgment, difficulty, and pains. As I write, the honourable and European reputation of _Louis_ occurs to my mind--an instance of universal acknowledgment rendered to genius and talents wholly or principally devoted to the alleviation of human suffering, and to the acquisition of wisdom in the form and by the method to which I have adverted.