“ ON THE FUTURE OF PHYSIC.” 37 
. . . Any man, or society of men, or council of many societies, 
that should set itself to work, in ever so small a way, to bring 
into use a simple and reasonable scientific language, would 
do a most important service to physic. . . . For the future of 
physic it is essential to revise our method of receiving and 
criticising what is brought to light as real or assumed 
novelty of knowledge. It is a marvel how physic is daily, 
and with infinite labour, rewritten ; still more, how this is 
criticised. Now the popularity of the literary business, 
I cannot call it literary art, absorbs every man ; and seden- 
tary force, force developed in situ , is, as compared with 
force in motu , all-prevailing, while criticisms have become 
mere impulses — bastards of love and hate, boldness and 
fear, adulation and objurgation, industry and ignorance, 
flux of generosity and flux of selfish conceit. ... As a nation 
we have a national fatuity for ignoring the history of our 
own country, and we are the most unpatriotic historians on 
the face of the earth. . . . These errors of the Victorian age 
must be reformed resolutely. Giving due, and even hand- 
some, credit to all fellow-wmrkers wherever they may be, we 
must become, in England, just to ourselves. For the future 
of physic it is essential that some revision be made in the 
system of training our sons for the work of our profession. 
... I leave the subject with satisfaction here because of the 
prospect, clear in view, of two or three great central schools 
for physic in London, and one or two more in the provinces; 
with the prospect of professors vying with each other in 
celebrity, and living by their work; and with the further 
prospect of students from the remotest parts of the earth 
trooping to our Asclepian temples, where the light always 
burns with increasing lustre.” 
Dr. Richardson next proceeds to speak of the necessity of 
revising and extending our methods of medical observation 
by the light, for instance, of the laws of dialysis; of the 
need of an improved field of research in reference to the 
functions to the nervous system ; the governing power of 
the sympathetic over the blood-vessels ; the molecular 
changes in nervous structure ; the directness of morbid 
impressions through the expanses of the nerves ; and of the 
primary origin of disease by instant change of nervous 
physical state, in accordance with the recent researches of 
Dr. Brown-Sequard. Speaking of curers and cures, Dr. 
Richardson observed : — 
“The influence of race on vitality; the estimation of 
individual and natural life-values, on some more certain 
methods than at the present time is known ; the classifica- 
