FERMENTATION. 56 i 



This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it 

 has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of 

 information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the 

 suffering sentient world. We have been scourged by invis- 

 ible throngs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and 

 it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in 

 upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like 

 these excite in me the thought that the rule and govern- 

 ance of this universe are different from what we in our 

 youth supposed them to be that the inscrutable Power, 

 at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move 

 and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by 

 means different to those usually resorted to. The first 

 requisite toward such propitiation is knowledge; the second 

 is action, shaped and illuminated by that knowledge. Of 

 knowledge we already see the dawn, which will open out 

 by and by to perfect day; while the action which is to 

 follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral 

 and emotional nature of man in his desire for personal 

 well-being, in his sense of duty, in his compassionate sym- 

 pathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. " How often," 

 says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid 

 Fever " How often have I seen in past days, in the single 

 narrow chamber of the day-laborer's cottage the father in 

 the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, 

 and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but 

 the devotion of some poor neighbor, who in too many cases 

 paid the penalty of her kindness in becoming herself the 

 victim of the same disorder!" From the vantage ground 

 already won I look forward with confident hope to the 

 triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here 

 described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly 

 revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, 

 whose intelligent co-operation is absolutely essential to suc- 

 cess, the final victory of humanity is only a question of 

 time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in the 

 triumphs of surgery as practiced at your doors. 



