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III
CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE
An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the
Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860.
"Facultate magis quam violentia."
HIPPOCRATES.
Our Annual Meeting never fails to teach us at least one lesson. The art
whose province it is to heal and to save cannot protect its own ranks
from the inroads of disease and the waste of the Destroyer.
Seventeen of our associates have been taken from us since our last
Anniversary. Most of them followed their calling in the villages or
towns that lie among the hills or along the inland streams. Only those
who have lived the kindly, mutually dependent life of the country, can
tell how near the physician who is the main reliance in sickness of all
the families throughout a thinly settled region comes to the hearts of
the people among whom he labors, how they value him while living, how
they cherish his memory when dead. For these friends of ours who have
gone before, there is now no more toil; they start from their slumbers no
more at the cry of pain; they sally forth no more into the storms; they
ride no longer over the lonely roads that knew them so well; their wheels
are rusting on their axles or rolling with other burdens; their watchful
eyes are closed to all the sorrows they lived to soothe. Not one of
these was famous in the great world; some were almost unknown beyond
their own immediate circle.
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