Medical essays 18421882 Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes 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: III. CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDI CAL SCIENCE." " Facuitate inagis qunni violentia." Hippocrates. Our Annual Meeting never fails to teach... more » us at least one lesson. The art whose province it is to heal and to save cannot protect its own ranks from the inroads of disease and the waste of the Destroyer. Seventeen of our associates have been taken from us since our last Anniversary. Most of them followed their calling in the villages or towns that lie among the hills or along the inland streams. Only those who have lived the kindly, mutually dependent life of the country, can tell how near the physician who is the main reliance in sickness of all the families throughout a thinly settled region comes to the hearts of the people among whom he labors, how they value him while living, how they cherish his memory when dead. For these friends of ours who have gone before, there is now no more toil ; they start from their slumbers no more at the cry of pain ; they sally forth no more into the storms ; they ride no longer over the lonely roads that knew them so well ; their wheels are rusting on their axles or rolling with other burdens ; An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860. their watchful eyes are closed to all the sorrows they lived to soothe. Not one of these was famous in the great world ; some were almost unknown beyond their own immediate circle. But they have left behind them that loving remembrance which is better than fame, and if their epitaphs are chiselled briefly in stone, they are written at full length on living tablets in a thousand homes to which they carried their ever-welcome aid and sympathy. One whom we have lost, very widely known and honored, was a leading practitioner of t...« less