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I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, which you
could put Park-Street Church on the bottom of and look over the vane
from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without
spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now
when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile _dementia_,
there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come,
from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.
Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
----You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did
not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old
folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
proprietor of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
reprints by Philadelphia Editors.
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