Education, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Homeopathy; Libraries, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Medicine
You may like to hear something of the famous Professors of Paris in the
days when I was a student in the Ecole de Medicine, and following the
great Hospital teachers.
I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners
and Professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled
with the train of students that attended the morning visits. See that
bent old man who is groping his way through the wards of La Charity.
That is the famous Baron Boyer, author of the great work on surgery in
nine volumes, a writer whose clearness of style commends his treatise to
general admiration, and makes it a kind of classic. He slashes away at a
terrible rate, they say, when he gets hold of the subject of fistula in
its most frequent habitat,--but I never saw him do more than look as if
he wanted to cut a good dollop out of a patient he was examining. The
short, square, substantial man with iron-gray hair, ruddy face, and
white apron is Baron Larrey, Napoleon's favorite surgeon, the most
honest man he ever saw,--it is reputed that he called him. To go round
the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns
of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of
Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver
in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle
smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of
Waterloo. Larrey was still strong and sturdy as I saw him, and few
portraits remain printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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