62 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [in. 



of an examiner to hear the word &quot;cell,&quot; &quot;germinal 

 matter,&quot; or &quot;carmine,&quot; without a sort of inward 

 shudder. 



Well, now, gentlemen, I am sure my colleagues in this 

 examination will bear me out in saying that I have not 

 been exaggerating the evils and defects which are current 

 have been current in a large quantity of the phy 

 siological teaching, the results of which come before 

 examiners. And it becomes a very interesting question 

 to know how all this comes about, and in what way it 

 can be remedied. How it comes about will be perfectly 

 obvious to any one who has considered the growth of 

 medicine. I suppose that medicine and surgery first 

 began by some savage, more intelligent than the rest, 

 discovering that a certain herb was good for a certain 

 pain, and that a certain pull, somehow or other, set a 

 dislocated joint right. I suppose all things had their 

 humble beginnings, and medicine and surgery were in 

 the same condition. People who wear watches know 

 nothing about watchmaking. A watch goes wrong and 

 it stops ; you see the owner giving it a shake, or, if he 

 is very bold, he opens the case, and gives the balance- 

 wheel a turn. Gentlemen, that is empirical practice, 

 and you know what are the results upon the watch. I 

 should think you can divine what are the results of ana 

 logous operations upon the human body. And because 

 men of sense very soon found that such were the effects 

 of meddling with very complicated machinery they did 

 not understand, I suppose the first thing, as being the 

 easiest, was to study the nature of the works of the 

 human watch, and the next thing was to study the way 

 the parts worked together, and the way the watch 

 worked. Thus, by degrees, we have had growing up our 

 body of anatomists, or knowers of the construction of the 

 human watch, and our physiologists, who know how the 



