Gentlemen:--1. When I thoughtfully consider the subject on which I am to
address you in this course of lectures, i.e., Medical Jurisprudence, I
am deeply impressed with the dignity and the importance of the matter.

The study of medicine is one of the noblest pursuits to which human
talent can be devoted. It is as far superior to geology, botany,
entomology, zoölogy, and a score of kindred sciences as its subject, the
body of man, the visible lord of the creation, is superior to the
subject of all other physical sciences, which do so much honor to the
power of the human mind; astronomy, which explores the vast realms of
space, traces the courses and weighs the bulks of its mighty orbs;
chemistry, which analyzes the minutest atoms of matter; physics, which
discovers the properties, and mechanics, which utilizes the powers of an
endless variety of bodies--all these noble sciences together are of less
service to man than that study which directly promotes the welfare of
his own structure, guards his very life, fosters the vigor of his youth,
promotes the physical and mental, aye, even the moral, powers of his
manhood, sustains his failing strength, restores his shattered health,
preserves the integrity of his aging faculties, and throughout his whole
career supplies those conditions without which both enjoyment and
utility of life would be impossible.

The physician, indeed, is one of the most highly valued benefactors of
mankind. Therefore he has ever been held in honor among his fellow-men;
by barbarous tribes he is looked upon as a connecting link between the
visible and the invisible world; in the most civilized communities, from
the time of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to the present day, he
has been held in deeper veneration than the members of almost any other
profession; even in the sacred oracles of Revelation his office is