“Yea, Luke, I do think she shall be well, and mayhap speedily. But it is not here with us she shall be well. For that redness of the cheek is but the sign of the fever which, after the Grecians, we do call the hectical; and that shining of the eyes is but a sickly glazing, and they which do every day get better and likewise thinner and weaker shall find that way leadeth to the church-yard gate. This is the malady which the ancients did call tubes, or the wasting disease, and some do name the consumption. A disease whereof most that fall ailing do perish. This Margaret is not long for earth--but she knoweth it not, and still hopeth.” “Why, then, Master, didst thou give her of thy medicine, seeing that her ail is unto death?” “Thou shalt learn, boy, that they which are sick must have somewhat wherewith to busy their thoughts. There be some who do give these tabid or consumptives a certain posset made with lime-water and anise and liquorice and raisins of the sun, and there be other some who do give the juice of craw-fishes boiled in barley-water with chicken-broth, but these be toys, as I do think, and ye shall find as good virtue, nay better, in this syrup of the simple called Maidenhair.” Something after this manner might Master Giles Firmin have delivered his clinical instructions. Somewhat in this way, a century and a half later, another New England physician, Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke, taught a young man who came to study with him, a very diligent and intelligent youth, James Jackson by name, the same whose portrait in his advanced years hangs upon this wall, long the honored Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, of whom I shall say something in this Lecture. Our venerated Teacher studied assiduously afterwards in the great London Hospitals, but I think he used to quote his “old Master” ten times where he quoted Mr. Cline or Dr. Woodville once. When I compare this direct transfer of the practical experience of a wise man into the mind of a student,--every fact one that he can use in the battle of life and death,--with the far off, unserviceable “scientific” truths that I and some others are in the habit of teaching, I cannot help asking myself whether, if we concede that our forefathers taught too little, there is not--a possibility that we may sometimes attempt to teach too much. I almost blush when I think of myself as describing the eight several facets on two slender processes of the palate bone, or the seven little twigs that branch off from the minute tympanic nerve, and I wonder whether my excellent colleague feels in the same way when he pictures himself as giving the constitution of neurin, which as he and I know very well is that of the hydrate of trimethyle-oxethyle-ammonium, or the formula for the production of alloxan, which, though none but the Professors and older students can be expected to remember it, is C10 H4 N4 O6+ 2HO, NO5=C8 H4 N2 O10+2CO2+N2+NH4 O, NO5.