INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
G17 
It will immediately be perceived that the physician-priest must 
have taken the place of the more usual mode of treating the sick, 
or, in other words, his services could only have been sought in 
cases of severity and danger ; that in others of less moment, 
such as wounds and the more trifling diseases, the medical ma- 
nagement of the sick must have been left to the good wives of the 
household, or to some lay individual who may have shewn tact 
and cleverness in the treatment of similar cases, and had leisure 
to give to the pursuit. Such a person existed in the barber, who, 
acquiring expertness of manipulation in the duties of his office, 
information from the tongues of those whose beards he pointed, 
and furnished with the opportunity of displaying his acquirements, 
naturally became the right-hand man of the housewife in cases of 
emergency. He could cleanse excoriated surfaces of the irritat- 
ing matters that oppressed them ; he could pour oils and bal- 
sams upon wounds; he could bandage and set straight broken 
and dislocated limbs; and, finally, he added to his other accom- 
plishments, in imitation of Podalirius, bleeding with dexterity. 
Such is a profile sketch of the barber-surgeon ; the ancient prac- 
titioner of medicine, more ancient even than the physician. As 
the barber-surgeon increased in reputation, or rather, perhaps, as 
the science of medicine by degrees offered a more enlarged field 
for occupation, the barber-surgeon relinquished that part of his 
calling that ministered to the outward adornment of the person, 
and reserved his time and his thought for the exclusive treatment 
of disease, and the performance of those operations which the 
priest-physician thought desirable. Such is the barber-surgeon : 
I need not stop to shew to what a magnificent tree the once 
humble shoot has now waxed. 
The distinctions between the physician and the surgeon were not 
to be maintained as science progressed. The surgeon no longer 
found separate employment in the treatment of wounds and 
external complaints, but a higher grade of education taught him 
that many external diseases originate in constitutional disorder, 
and he was compelled to intrude upon the once sacred department 
of the physician. The surgeon of the present day no longer in- 
quires if the disease which he is called upon to treat is confined 
to the exterior: braced with the armour of knowledge that may 
breast and defy the invasions of disease, whatever aspect the 
enemy may assume, he treats disease according to the principles 
of our common science, medicine. The physicians, as a body, 
have not as yet thrown up their special attention to internal dis- 
ease : their natural range is far wider than that of the surgeon, 
and necessity and policy together combine to preserve the early 
distinctions of medicine. 
4 o 
VOL. XV. 
