674 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
At St. Thomas’s Hospital, Dr. Bernays expatiated on the dignity and 
responsibility of medical science :—If they asked him what was committed 
to the care of a physician, he answered the life, the sacred life of man— 
life of such importance that our Maker had said, “ He who sheds man’s 
blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Surely no mean thing this ! Nay, 
rather was there any greater calling ? The medical practitioner should be a 
gentleman, if not by birth, by feeling and education; able with discretion 
and delicacy to administer, not to the body alone, but to many a mind 
diseased and afflicted. He should know how to possess his own soul in 
order to be duly enlightened as to the responsibility which he incurs in under¬ 
taking the care of another’s life. And he must have knowledge. Without 
intelligence, knowledge, and industry, how could a man practise the medical 
profession? The soul was not made to be a mere receiver of knowledge. 
No man had ever fallen in the pursuit after the likeness of God; but mere 
knowledge, without God, had slain its thousands. God’s power and majesty 
might be seen in nature—His mercy and will in the volume of inspiration. 
A knowledge of the former was very valuable, but a knowledge of the latter 
was indispensable. Was it difficult to attain? Thank God, no ! It was 
all written within the compass of a small volume; all that they needed 
was a teachable spirit. And in the multiplicity of a student’s work, how 
thankful he should be for the Sunday ! Let them not employ it for secular 
purposes; and if any portion of it were devoted to recreation, let it be that 
which their conscience approved. 
Dr. Webb, at the Grosvenor Place School of Medicine, explicitly avowed 
in his eloquent address the authority of an inspired revelation. “ Truth, 
the great prize with which knowledge rewarded her votaries, the attainment 
and possession of which was the high guerdon after which man in all ages 
and in all countries had ever been toiling, was to be obtained. She was 
within the grasp of all. But this noble quarry was not the reward of the 
airy flight of imagination. Speculation discovered her not; reason, pure 
and unassisted, lost herself in inextricable mazes in her search. Yet she 
was around us all and in us all. Her great Author, who had implanted in 
man the insatiable desire to possess her, had given him two revelations 
wherein she was to be found—one from above, which told of man’s relations 
to himself; the other in the glorious universe around us, and of which we 
physically form a part—the reflection of the intellect of the Supreme, the 
everlasting tablets on which are incribed the thoughts of the Divinity. It 
was with the latter revelation that they in that place had to do. By its 
investigation truth would be their own.” 
Dr. Odling, at Guy’s, made some apposite remarks on natural laws, the 
whole tone of which was thoroughly healthy. “The laws of nature existed 
less in nature than in the human mind. They were not God’s full expres¬ 
sions, but man’s imperfect conclusions. All observational laws, of the 
lowest degree of generality, whether physical, chemical, or vital, were or 
had been inexact. As they became more abstract they became more per¬ 
fect; but it was only when the laws of the highest degree of generality were 
arrived at that all variation and exception disappeared.” Tie commended 
an honest love of truth. “All men loved truth in the abstract, but few 
loved that particular truth which was subversive of their own opinions. It 
required an education or mental discipline to overcome the propensity that 
exists in all men to disregard the results which oppose and to exact the results 
which support their own theories.” In conclusion, he warned his hearers 
against that barren scepticism which resulted in indifference, and advocated 
that fertile scepticism which resulted in exertion. He assured them that the 
science of medicine was a reality based on the interpretation of nature, and 
that its phenomena were amenable to general laws, and that its problems in¬ 
vited their investigation. He maintained that the study and practice of medi- 
