Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER III. INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN, PROGRESS, AND EXTENT OF THE MEDICAL DOCTRINES ON MILK-METASTASIS, OR WHAT THE FRENCH WRITERS CALLED ERREMENTS DU LAIT. 27. In this letter I propose to call your attention further to certain ancient opinions or notions, concerning childbed fever, whose former existence in our Class or Scholarship, though they be now supposed no longer to prevail, do, to a certain extent, still mould our views of diseases, and bias our methods of cure. I heartily wish I were capable of setting before you in these communications so complete a representation of the most ancient as well as modern notions, that my pages, like a bright Daguerreotype plate, might reflect the whole of the truth in even its most trivial and minute parts, and finally fix them there, so that, but to look upon them would be to have a conspectus of one entire medical cosmos—if I may be allowed to compare the small with the great. In educating yourselves as physicians, you ought to aim at the possession of a vast amount of knowledge of Medicine; for Medicine is an individuality or identity, which, to be thoroughly known, must be known not only as it is, but as it was; our successors in future ages, are they to whom is vouchsafed the knowledge of what it is destined to be. Our own mission is to know its past and its present states only; and we should be but imperfectly taught, if we stop short of the possible in these regards. 28. I have said, in another place, that words, written or spoken, are not always lost in silence as soon as the ordinary reverberations of them cease; but, on the contrary, they become a sort of material things, durable and indestructible in the minds of men; lingering among them for ages, and passing downwards with the THOMAS WILLIS. 53 lapse of time to c...