530 THE MOUNTAIN. 



lar profession to offer to fulfill the dream of the Greek in his 

 conception of the god of medicine ? "In the thick darkness 

 are there gleams of a better light?" What promise has 

 the profession made to men that it cannot redeem ? What 

 hope has it excited that it cannot realize ? What faith has it 

 inspired to be met by disappointment ? What can the pro- 

 fession emphatically do ? What has it done and rendered 

 fixed and established immutably as law, by principles of the 

 positive and absolute in philosophy? And here it must 

 be said, that a systematic and logical recitation of what it 

 has done, a catalogue of its unquestioned and demonstrable 

 elements, would be a treatise on the philosophy of medical 

 science, a serious and profound recapitulation of which, to- 

 gether with a historical account of the order of sequence of 

 development, with the unalterable laws of affinity or alliance 

 which chain them together in nature, is a desideratum that 

 can in no way be supplied by a hurried flash, or popular 

 story. An enumeration of a few obvious achievements of 

 the regular profession comes spontaneously and irrepressi- 

 bly, and must here be made without any effort at organic 

 plasticity, or logical cohesion. 



The profession has built a science of Anatomy, or a per- 

 fect demonstration of the most intimate molecular struc- 

 ture of the body as a machine, subsequently introducing 

 the mind to a sublime reading and analysis of the great 

 series of organic forms; "for the human form is the gram- 

 mar of every school which gives real instructions to man- 

 kind." It has also, by a carefully-conducted succession of 

 experiments and observations on the vital actions of the 

 same machine under the influence of powers within itself, 

 a series of forces that seems to use the body, with its 

 congeries of organs, as instruments of its use and will, 

 cognized the laws of life of the organs and tissues, or 

 created a science of physiology. With patience and assi- 

 duity in the dead-house, it has explored the results of 

 disease in its action on the body, has critically appre- 

 ciated the after-death appearances, connecting them with 



