One mode of faith-healing in modern days, which passes under the remarkable name of Christian Science, is probably nothing more than mental suggestion under another name. “The patient is told to be calm, and is assured that all will go well; that he must try to aid the healer by believing that what is told him is true. The healer then, quietly but firmly, asserts and reiterates that there is no pain, no suffering, that it is disappearing, that relief will come, that the patient is getting well.” This is precisely the method which Bernheim used to use with such success in his hypnotic patients at Nancy, iterating and reiterating, in a most wearisome way, that the disease would disappear and the patient would feel better. As has been pointed out by a recent writer (Dr. Harry Marshall), the chief basis for the growth of Christian Science is that which underlies every popular fallacy: “Oliver Wendell Holmes outlined very clearly the factors concerned, showing (a) how easily abundant facts can be collected to prove anything whatsoever; (b) how insufficient ‘exalted wisdom, immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements’ are to prevent an individual from having the most primitive ideas upon subjects out of his line of thought; and, finally, demonstrating ‘the boundless credulity and excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.’” WILLIAM OSLER. SURGERY The end of the eighteenth century was made notable by one of the most remarkable and beneficent discoveries which has ever blessed the human race, the discovery of the means of preventing small-pox. On May 14, 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps. When we remember that two million persons died in a single year in the Russian Empire from small-pox; that in 1707 in Iceland, out of a population of thirty thousand, sixty per cent., or eighteen thousand, died; that in Jenner’s time “an adult person who had not had small-pox was scarcely met with or heard of in the United Kingdom, and that owing to his discovery small-pox is now one of the rarest diseases,” the strong words I have used seem fully justified. But the eighteenth century was not to witness the end of progress in medicine. The advances in the nineteenth century have been even more startling and more beneficent. What these advances have been in the department of medicine has been related by Professor Osler. It is my province to speak only of surgery. METHOD OF TEACHING