"You need not be surprised, then, if among this large number of young men there should have been now and then something to find fault with. Twice in the course of thirty-five years I have had occasion to rebuke the acts of individual students, once in the presence of the whole class on the human and manly sympathy of which I could always safely rely. I have been in the habit of considering myself at liberty to visit the department I am speaking of, though it had its own officers; I took a part in drawing up the original regulations which governed the methods of work; I have often found fault with individuals or small classes for a want of method and neatness which is too common in all such places. But in the face of all peccadilloes and of the idle and baseless stories which have been circulated, I will say, as if from the chair I no longer occupy, that the management of the difficult, delicate and all important branch committed to the care of a succession of laborious and conscientious demonstrators, as I have known it through more than the third of a century, has been discreet, humane, faithful, and that the record of that department is most honorable to them and to the classes they have instructed. "But there are better things to think of and to speak of than the false and foolish stories to which we have been forced to listen. While the pitiable attempt has been making to excite the feelings of the ignorant against the school of the university, hundreds of sufferers throughout Christendom--throughout civilization--have been blessing the name of Boston and the Harvard Medical School as the source from which relief has reached them for one of the gravest injuries, and for one of the most distressing of human maladies. I witnessed many of the experiments by which the great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Harvard University, has made the world his debtor. Those poor remains of mortality of which we have heard so much, have been of more service to the human race than the souls once within them ever dreamed of conferring. Doctor Bigelow's repeated and searching investigations into the anatomy of the hip joint showed him the band which formed the chief difficulty in reducing dislocations of the thigh. What Sir Astley Cooper and all the surgeons after him had failed to see, Doctor Bigelow detected. New rules for reduction of the dislocation were the consequence, and the terrible pulleys disappeared from the operating amphitheatre.