I may, however, call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact, that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary activity. Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with certain exceptions, as “decidedly less effective” than that of his own country. Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the simple British practice of procuring union by the first intention against the attacks of M. Roux and Baron Larrey. [Cooper's Surg. Diet. art. “Wounds.” Yet Mr. John Bell gives the French surgeons credit for introducing this doctrine of adhesion, and accuses O'Halloran of “rudeness and ignorance,” and “bold, uncivil language,” in disputing their teaching. Princ. of Surgery, vol. i. p. 42. Mr. Hunter succeeded at last in naturalizing the doctrine and practice, but even he had to struggle against the perpetual jealousy of rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.] We have often heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen. While Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all the wisdom is necessarily with us in both cases. Our art has had two or three lessons which have a deep meaning to those who are willing to read them honestly. The use of water-dressings in surgery completed the series of reforms by which was abolished the “coarse and cruel practice” of the older surgeons, who with their dressings and acrid balsams, their tents and leaden tubes, “absolutely delayed the cure.” The doctrine of Broussais, transient as was its empire, reversed the practice of half of Christendom for a season, and taught its hasty disciples to shun their old favorite remedies as mortal poisons. This was not enough permanently to shift the presumption about drugs where it belonged, and so at last, just as the sympathetic powder and the Unguentum Armarium came in a superstitious age to kill out the abuses of external over-medication, the solemn farce of Homoeopathy was enacted in the face of our own too credulous civilization, that under shelter of its pretences the “inward bruises” of over-drugged viscera might be allowed to heal by the first intention. Its lesson we must accept, whether we will or not; its follies we are tired of talking about. The security of the medical profession against this and all similar fancies is in the average constitution of the human mind with regard to the laws of evidence. My friends and brothers in Art! There is nothing to be feared from the utterance of any seeming heresy to which you may have listened. I cannot compromise your collective wisdom. If I have strained the truth one hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis, you are accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment, and know full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and the nervous palpitations of rhetoric.