IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 61 



it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest them 

 all with its specifics. 



It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to 

 check the freest expression of opinion as to the effi- 

 cacy of any or all of the " heroic " means of treatment 

 employed by practitioners of different schools and pe- 

 riods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we 

 must not forget that there is a higher experience, which 

 tries its results in a court of a still larger jurisdiction ; 

 that, namely, in which the laws of human belief are 

 summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to 

 the sources of error which beset the medical practi- 

 tioner. The verdict is as old as the father of medicine, 

 who announces it in the words, "judgment is difficult." 

 Physicians differed so in his time, that some denied 

 that there was any such thing as an art of medicine. 

 One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by 

 another. The art of healing was like soothsaying, so 

 the common people said ; the same bird was lucky or 

 unlucky, according as he flew to the right or left.* 



The practice of medicine has undergone great chan- 

 ges within the period of my own observation. Vene- 

 section, for instance, has so far gone out of fashion, 

 that, as I am told by residents of the New York 

 Bellevue and the Massachusetts General Hospitals, 

 it is almost obsolete in these institutions, at least in 

 medical practice.f The old Brunonian stimulating 



* Uepi AtaiTrjs 'Ole'cw, § IV. v. 



t A similar change has taken place also in English surgical practice. 

 Sir W. Napier speaks of " that inveterate use of the lancet, which dis- 



