To consider them apart from
this, would be to localize a planetary phenomenon, and to provincialize a
law of the universe. The art of healing in Massachusetts has shared more
or less fully and readily the movement which, with its periods of ebb and
flow, has been raising its level from age to age throughout the better
part of Christendom. Its practitioners brought with them much of the
knowledge and many of the errors of the Old World; they have always been
in communication with its wisdom and its folly; it is not without
interest to see how far the new conditions in which they found themselves
have been favorable or unfavorable to the growth of sound medical
knowledge and practice.
The state of medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and
country,--one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged. Surgery
invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of
the age of stone,--a relic of which we may find in the practice of
Zipporah, the wife of Moses,--to the delicate operations of to-day upon
patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which
presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of the workshop and
the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to accumulate. Before
the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia, or the quinine which
arrests the fit of an ague, can find their place in our pharmacies,
commerce must have perfected its machinery, and science must have refined
its processes, through periods only to be counted by the life of nations.
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