PHYSIC. 87 



CHAPTER VI. 



WORK OF THE BRAIN. 



MEDICINE, during the last hundred years, has been 

 developing with energy among the sciences, and marking, 

 by an ample ring of newly-acquired knowledge, each 

 year's growth. The study of it may be compared now to 

 a tree planted on congenial soil, for its roots are imbedded 

 in a fair amount of ascertained truth concerning the prin- 

 ciples upon which nature acts. When there was no true 

 natural philosophy, there could be no true science of 

 medicine. Medicine was then an art, in which there 

 was awakened no inherent power of development. Dis- 

 eases are so various in kind, and those of the same kind 

 so various in aspect, that the best empiric, with no thread 

 of principle to follow, is a man lost in a labyrinth. Before 

 anything like a correct knowledge of the ways of nature 

 had supplied the clue, it was in the choice of the physician 

 either to treat his patients in accordance with some theory 

 deduced from the false data furnished by an unsubstantial 

 philosophy, or to argue wholly, as well as he could, from 



