PREFACE 



I have written these brief sketches of the lives 

 of some of our great medical forebears who lived 

 in the days when there were giants and when the 

 Anakim lived in the land, in order to while away 

 a few pleasant hours and to wean my fellow- 

 doctors and surgeons a little from the pragmatic 

 spirit of the age. The lives of some of these old 

 worthies led them to lift their eyes daily from 

 nature to nature's God and to recognize in the 

 Bible the same hand that made the floweret, so 

 that Chaucer's accusation " His studie was but 

 litel on the Bible " no longer held. I would that 

 many of their lineal successors were like them in 

 their piety. 



My lifelong interest in botany began in the 

 year 1874, w i tn a warm friendship with Dr. J. P. 

 Crozier Griffith at Upland, Delaware County, 

 Pennsylvania. Later, in 1877, we were both 

 medical students when I had assumed charge of 

 a Summer School of Natural History at North 

 Mountain, in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, to- 

 gether with my lifelong friend, Dr. Lewis H. 

 Taylor, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. We 

 three botanized in the footsteps of our revered 

 predecessor, that distinguished botanist, Dr. J. T. 



