A Valedictory address delivered to the graduating class of the Medical Institution of Yale College : January 15, 1852 / by James H. Curry.

  • Curry, James H. (James Hart), 1827?-1900.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A Valedictory address delivered to the graduating class of the Medical Institution of Yale College : January 15, 1852 / by James H. Curry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Yours is not to be that chimerical philanthropy which girts the globe, but leaves the miseries of its inhabitants unalleviated. You are not to stand on the ramparts of State, sounding your own folly. Your arena is the social, the domestic world ; your philanthropy is condensed, concen- trated, practical and powerful. Your province is to bind up the bleeding hearts of families, to chase away the fears of those who sit under the shadow of death, and to throw the sunlight of health around the hearth- stone. You may not share the honors of political preferment, but you will not taste the bitterness of political strife. You are not to harangue the public with your notions of higher law or lower law ; for in following the duties of your profession, and acting in accordance with its precepts, you yourselves become living solutions of that vexa- tious problem which has so long baffled the acumen of the profoundest statesmen—showing that you at least can defend the Constitution and still act in accordance with that higher law which inculcates love to the whole human race. Having premised thus much, I now propose to address you briefly on a subject of interest, not to the members of our profession only, but to all: to wit— Eclectic System of Medicine versus Quackery. By this let no one understand me that there are two sciences of medi- cine. There is but one. But there are two schools, the orthodox and the heterodox—or, in common parlance, the school of physicians and the school of quacks. I know that more have been enumerated. I know the world has been as thoroughly scourged by the Protean forms of prac- tice, as Egypt was with frogs. Still they are all resolvable to these two —there can be no medium ; he who is not of one, is of the other. For whether practitioners follow one method or another, to the exclusion of all others ; whether they style themselves botanists, hydropathists, homoe- opathists, allopathists, or any other exclusive opathists, they are all alike— similia similibus—they are not to be trusted ; for selfishness or ignorance has blinded them. By the agency of such men our science has been immolated for more than two thousand years ; and not only the science, for with its smoke has mingled that of a more frightful and unholy holocaust, even the holocaust of a million murdered victims, slain by the very men who from their profession should have been their protectors. So great, in fact, have been the evils produced by untaught and unprincipled men (for they are equally dangerous) that medical science in toto has been 1*