JACOB BIGELOW. 337 



summed up the question between nature and medical art so fairly and 

 so clearly, that from that day forward the empirical habit of interfer- 

 ence, for the sake of interfering, with the course of a self-evolving and 

 self-terminating disease may be said to have declined. 



This essay was republished in a volume, with sixteen other papers, 

 in the year 1854. Every one of these papers will be found marked 

 by the characteristic excellences of the writer, from the Experiments 

 on the Effects of Different Methods of Treating Burns, the Boylston 

 Prize Dissertation before referred to, to the Address delivered before 

 this Academy at the opening of their course of Lectures in 1852. An- 

 other little volume, " Expositions of Rational Medicine," published in 

 1858, illustrated the doctrine of the Discourse on Self-limited Diseases 

 in a fable called " The Paradise of Doctors," followed by a short essay 

 and an appendix, containing a reprint of a part of an article by Sir 

 John Forbes in the British Foreign Medical Review. Dr. Bigelow 

 always selected the right subject ; he always knew just what iron was 

 lying white on the anvil. He had the art in which the telegraph has 

 been giving the new generation lessons, — that of using just as many 

 words as were needed to convey his meaning clearly, and no more, 

 except that his wit or his learning would betray itself now and then 

 by a lively illustration or an apposite quotation. He always went 

 straight for the vital point in the subject he was handling: it was he 

 who in our debates before societies waited until others had teased the 

 subject under discussion until it was wearied and bewildered, and then 

 gave it the coup de grace. His style was that of a scholar who wears 

 his robes of learning with such ease that no common-sense movement 

 of his intelligence is hindered or made awkward by them. The Presi 

 dent of our Historical Society, Mr. Wiuthrop, always felicitous in his 

 characterizations, has coupled the name of Dr. Bigelow with that of 

 " the great Bostonian," Benjamin Fz - anklin. No comparison could be 

 happier. Franklin was not college-bred, like our contemporary; but 

 he had a literary turn, and composed ballads in his early youth, and 

 used language as simple and lucid as any man who ever wrote English. 

 Both were good-natured and good-tempered ; both had a charming 

 vein of pleasantry, which often showed itself in genuine wit and humor ; 

 both were abounding in mechanical ingenuity ; both had a shrewd eye 

 for the practical, and knew well how to handle their resources so as to 

 make them tell with the best effect ; both questioned the universe in 

 a smiling, half-philosophical, half-practical sort of way, having, as one 

 might say, a constitutional trust that things would come out right in 

 the end ; both, it may be suspected, carried a good many unsolved 

 vol. xiv. (n. s. vi.) 22 



