and fallacies and pretensions, the folly of which they would see at once in relation to any other subject. They refuse to give to either the science, or the profession, that steady esteem which is clearly due to it from all stable and intelligent men. In seasons of trial even, instead of extending to physicians their confidence and support, they reward their toils with an ungenerous and inconsiderate fault-finding. This ingratitude of the public is sometimes manifested in the most offensive manner. After the yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1798 had subsided, at a meeting of the citizens, in which the committee who superintended the city during the prevalence of the disease was honored with a vote of thanks, a similar vote was proposed in relation to the physicians, _but was not even seconded_, though, as I have stated in another place, nearly one fourth of their number perished, in their efforts to save that ungrateful people from the ravages of the pestilence. Let us turn now to the consideration of the _pleasures_ of a medical life. On this branch of the subject I shall be brief, not because the physician has few joys, for he has many, but because they require no extended notice to make the reader appreciate them. If we look at medicine simply as a science it is full of interest, and the study of it is therefore a rich source of gratification. Its subjects have a wide range and an endless variety. No science has such extensive and intimate connections with other sciences.[46] It gathers to itself the resources of chemistry, botany, mechanics, comparative anatomy and physiology, and mental philosophy; and fills its storehouse of facts with a variety and abundance sufficient to satisfy the wildest and most eager curiosity. The phenomena of life even in the healthy condition are exceedingly diversified; but, as modified by disease, and by the remedies which are administered, their variations are never ending. And then the mysterious connection of mind and body not only varies them still more, but opens to us a mass of facts of a mingled mental and physical character, which awaken an intense interest. The physician looks upon the human body, not merely as a machine filled with contrivances so cunning and elaborate, as to render all the mechanism of man in the comparison rude and bungling; but as a machine instinct with life, having a living nerve attached to every fibre of it, giving to it its power to act; and, more than all, as a machine holding in strange connection with its every fibre a reasoning soul, the image of the Deity, destined, not to perish like the mind of the brute with the perishing body, but to live through the ages of eternity.