I purpose to devote the time, which your indulgence has placed at my disposal this evening, to laying before you the results of some inquiries into the origin and history of medicine and of the medical profession; regarding the subject rather from a social than from a scientific point of view.
My scheme will introduce you to some of your old acquaintances; not for instruction, but to remind you of those passages in their lives which may have been pressed out of your memories by the sterner realities of professional duties.
An inquiry into the origin of medicine must begin with the history of man himself, since pain and death are the inevitable conditions of his existence; and the desire to mitigate the former, and postpone the triumphs of the latter arose from, and has kept pace with, the development of the various diseases to which time and circumstances have subjected him.
The primal man, we know, was created pure and innocent, free from liability to pain, and possessed of unmixed capacity for the enjoyment of the pleasures that surrounded him; glowing with health, and with every emotion redolent of new delight. At sight of him,
Each hill gave sign of gratulation,
Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs
Whisper’d it to the woods; and from their wings
Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub:—
Apprehension of the miseries to which his progeny were doomed, would have marred this happiness; hence his ignorance of evil, and his belief that the felicity he enjoyed would be as permanent as it was perfect. But our business is with man in his actual condition; the sport of
“All maladies