Excerpt from Introductory Lecture Delivered Before the Medical Class in Castleton Medical College, at the Opening of the Fall Session, 1842

To prepare you to think correctly, and thus theorize for yourselves, it will be necessary to review the ancient and modern doctrines of general and special medicine, including the theories which have successively had their day among medical philosophers. These with the facts by which they were attempted to be sustained by their authors and adherents, will constitute the ground-work of the pres ent course. In this brief and cursory view of the past, which is all that our time will permit, you will find that much, very much which is true in medicine is as old as Hippocrates, many of his theories having been based upon observation and experience, and being there fore of necessity immutable. His errors were few and inconsidera ble, even as discoverable in the advanced state of our knowledge at this day, notwithstanding the disadvantages under which he pur sued his researches, ia ignorance of human structure, except so far as it could be revealed to him by the dissection of inferior animals. Under these circumstances we are constrained at this day to marvel, not at his errors, but that he could, by possibility, have acquired the knowledge, of which his writings give evidence.

All modern physicians at the present day regard Anatomy, healthy and morbid, as constituting the elements of all the accuracy to which we can attain in medicine, and their theories are constructed by studying symptoms in reference to such anatomy, and by testing the powers of remedies by experience. It is upon facts such as these, that our science is now made rigidly one of induction. Simi lar facts have been accumulating for centuries, and as they are tan gible in their character, and susceptible of demonstration by every inquirer for himself, the constancy of their recurrence in the hands and under the eye of every observer, affords a protection against any considerable error or fallacy.

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