"I freely confess that I had some difficulty in accepting, notwithstanding the imposing authority of Graves, what he states of the influence of certain remedies, such as mercurials, essence of turpentine, spirituous preparations, nitrate of silver, etc.; but the Dublin professor speaks with so much conviction that I ventured to follow his precepts, and I must say that my early trials very soon encouraged me to adopt unreservedly what I at first accepted only with misgivings. There is not a day that I do not in my practice employ some of the modes of treatment which Graves excels in describing with the minuteness of the true practitioner, and not a day that I do not, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Dublin physician for the information he has given me. "Graves is, in my acceptation of the term, a perfect clinical teacher. An attentive observer, a profound philosopher, an ingenious artist, an able therapeutist, he commends to our admiration the art whose domain he enlarges, and the practice which he renders more useful and more fertile." After this tribute from one who was himself one of the greatest medical teachers of his generation, it will be very interesting to find how much Graves anticipated nearly three-quarters of a century ago the principles of the bedside {178} teaching of medicine which have come to be acknowledged as the only sure basis of a genuine, practical medical education. For him the only possible way to learn medicine practically was to study it at the bedside, and he insisted over and over again that while the theoretical sciences allied to medicine were eminently fascinating, they were of little actual value in teaching the student how to solve the all-important problem of treating patients. In his address before the Dublin Medico-Chirurgical Society, an association of students in connection with the Dublin hospitals, he said in 1836: