But there were positive as well as
negative facts to be learned, and some of us, I fear, came home rich in
the negatives of the expectant practice, poor in the resources which many
a plain country practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and
the cure of disease. No one instructor can be expected to do all for a
student which he requires. Louis taught us who followed him the love of
truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature, the
most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure means of
getting at the results to be obtained from them in the constant
employment of accurate tabulation. He was not a showy, or eloquent, or,
I should say, a very generally popular man, though the favorite, almost
the idol, of many students, especially Genevese and Bostonians. But he
was a man of lofty and admirable scientific character, and his work will
endure in its influences long after his name is lost sight of save to the
faded eyes of the student of medical literature.
Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who were
teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me. They are but empty
sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more than middle
age. Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a very popular
work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's hands when I first
began to ask for medical text-books? I heard him lecture once, and have
had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,--a
venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete antiquity.
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