Excerpt from Edinburgh Medical Journal, Vol. 25: Combining the Monthly Journal of Medicine and the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal; Part II. January to June, 1880

Six years ago, my respected friend Dr George Balfour drew, in his introductory address, a vivid picture of Hippocrates, released for a space from Hades, walking into one of the clinical wards of the Royal Infirmary, and surveying with silent yet dignified wonder the changes which had taken place in the methods of diagnosis and treatment of disease during the intervening twenty-three hundred years. He was pictured handling for the first time a stethoscope, a test tube, and clinical reagents, gazing on galvanic batteries and other apparatus as unkent to him as the locomotive, and feeling at the same time not perfectly disposed to abjure the principles on which practice had been founded in the Asclepion of Cos. But I feel equally justified in picturing to you the Syme, the Bennett, the Alison, and the Henderson of 1850, stepping into our wards in this year of our Lord. Picture to yourself the Syme, who in those days was wont to amputate a limb in simplest fashion, surveying the Annandale Of to-day performing the like office shrouded in a halo of carbolic spray generated by a steam-engine, laving him self and his instruments and his dressers in mysterious lotions, suspending the limb to be removed from a gallows, and investing the stump in complicated dressings. Fancy what would be con veyed to him by 1 to 20, 1 to 40, 1 to 60 it could but sound as a mystic Abracadabra. Where would Bennett have been amongst the complicated apparatus by means of which Rutherford now illustrates his course What did Henderson know of those delicate sections which now-a - days enable the Professor of Pathology to bring palpably under the eyes of his students the solutions of histo logical continuity constituting disease Picture to yourselves Alison with a sphygmograph, a laryngoscope, or a hypodermic syringe placed in his hands: fancy m'kenzie, the leading oculist of that time, asked to make use of an ophthalinosoopez - it is needless to pile up further instances for my present purpose, the few I have adduced cannot but serve to illustrate the position, which is, that any one of those professors of 1850 would be not one whit less dazed in 1879 than Hippocrates was fabled to be by Dr Balfour.

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