ON THE FUTURE OF PHYSIC. 
35 
tc 
}) 
venting and curing disease. Therefore I have been led to 
ask, what can we who now exist do for the future? What 
are we doing; for it? Are we doing; the best we can for it, or 
can w r e amend? In these contemplations I have founded 
the subject of the present discourse. At first sight the 
position of the present, from which we start, is neither 
assuring nor promising. A severe critic, with no intention 
of untruth, might say of us that w r e live and breathe in un- 
certainty; that, socially, w T e appear to dabble with ques- 
tions of legislation without either teaching or influencing 
the legislator; that we appear to trust to Government pro- 
tection for the right to apply our skill, and, instead of 
aiming to cast away the oppressive shield it loans to us at 
bitter interest, are ever wailing for the shield to be made 
stronger and heavier; that w^e appear to rise to practice on 
the paper wings of advertised emptiness, filling the sheet not 
with painful touch of scientific industry and unsparing fact, 
but with the egotism of belief that each of us has done w 7 hat 
others have not done and cannot do, though they religiously 
strive to follow our lead ; that, scientifically, w r e are in- 
coherent and chaotic, and, like all chaoses, jarring, without 
reason ; over proud of what we really do, and deaf to the 
demand that we must do more or be trusted less Be it 
my duty to indicate a leaf or two of the day-book of our life that 
may be revised wisely, a leaf or two that may be torn out 
wisely, or elaborated before that book passes into that 
unknown where it is ours no longer, either to cast, tear up, 
revise, or preserve. If we begin w r ith what may be torn 
up, we come to a heap of mouldy leaves, supposed to contain 
some hidden virtue for making us powerful and respectable, 
but chiefly powerful in the world. They are docketed as 
papers between the profession and the State . . . papers that 
have cost us more trouble and more money during the present 
century than all our scientific and practical work since we 
became a profession. For the purpose of cultivating these 
leaves, or preparing soil for them, great voluntary organisa- 
tions have been instituted during the era, which bodies, in 
one w-ay or another — in eating, drinking, travelling, speaking, 
organising, disorganising, quarrelling, fraternising, writing, 
advertising, and printing — have, within her Majesty's reign, 
disgorged themselves of not less than one quarter of a mil- 
lion of her Majesty's portraits in sovereign gold. While 
another legal organisation, more compact, much more prac- 
tical for itself, and much more determinate, has skilfully 
extracted by and for these same leaves some tens of thou- 
sands more. The leaves themselves have simply taken from 
