Two centuries ago, and even later than this, it was not thought unprofessional for a physician to have secret remedies. Thus Dr. Goddard, who was much trusted by Oliver Cromwell, who was one of the original members of the Royal Society, professor at Gresham College, the friend of Sydenham, and a Fellow of the College in 1646, was the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” The most notable instance of “professional secrets,” however, is that of the midwifery forceps. This was the secret of the Chamberlen family, of whom I will mention two. =Peter Chamberlen= (M.D. Padua, F.R.C.P. 1628) was probably the first fashionable obstetrician, and is supposed to have been the inventor of the forceps. He made an attempt to organise the monthly nurses, was much employed about the English court, and had eighteen children by his two wives. =Hugh Chamberlen=, the son of Hugh Chamberlen and the nephew of Peter Chamberlen (F.R.C.P. 1694), was the most celebrated man-midwife of his day. He published a translation of Mauriceau’s Midwifery, and in the preface to that book he says: “I will now take leave to offer an apology for not publishing the secret I mention we have to extract children without hooks where other artists use them; viz., there being my father and two brothers living that practise this art, I cannot esteem it my own to dispose of nor publish it without injury to them, and I think I have not been unserviceable to my own country, although I do but inform them that the forementioned three persons of our family and myself can serve them in these extremities with greater safety than others.” This is a very pretty specimen of medical ethics on the part of one who was a censor of the College as late as 1721. What are probably the original forceps were accidentally discovered, in 1815, at Woodham Mortimer Hall, Essex, formerly the residence of Peter Chamberlen. “They were found under a trap-door in the floor of the uppermost of a series of closets, built over the entrance porch,” and may now be seen in the library of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society. Hugh Chamberlen is buried in Westminster Abbey, where a Latin epitaph of seventy-two lines, by Bishop Atterbury, adorns his tomb. I feel tempted to mention two or three more of the early physicians who are deservedly famous, but in doing so I must limit myself to those who flourished mainly in the seventeenth century.