I can bear the voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the Anatomist
and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation: "What is this stuff
with which you are cramming the brains of young men who are to hold the
lives of the community in their hands? Here is a man fallen in a fit;
you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the two processes of the
palate bone, but you have not had the sense to loosen that man's
neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a fool? Here is a
fellow that has just swallowed poison. I want something to turn his
stomach inside out at the shortest notice. Oh, you have forgotten the
dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember the formula for the
production of alloxan!"
"Look you, Master Doctor,--if I go to a carpenter to come and stop a leak
in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care whether he
is a botanist or not? Cannot a man work in wood without knowing all
about endogens and exogens, or must he attend Professor Gray's Lectures
before he can be trusted to make a box-trap? If my horse casts a shoe,
do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to shoe him until I have made
sure that he is sound on the distinction between the sesquioxide and the
protosesquioxide of iron?"
--But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the
next generation, or in some possible remote future.
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