"
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.
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