Excerpt from An Introductory Lecture on the Treatment of Disease: Delivered Before the Medical Class at the Massachusetts Medical College, in Boston, November 3, 1852

It would at first seem that the exact sciences were those most worthy the cultivation of intelligent minds, inasmuch as they lead to satisfactory, and therefore to gratifying results; and because, in their more elevated departments, they involve and require some of the highest reaches of the human intellect. But in the opinions of mankind, as evinced by their practice, the opposite judgment prevails, and probably nine-tenths of the labor of educated and intellectual men, are employed on studies which are, in their nature, un certain and conjectural.

The cause of this great ascendancy in the attention given to the inexact sciences, is to be found in the vast and paramount importance of their subjects, and also in the difficulty of consummating their great ends. It is much more important to mankind to know how to avoid anarchy and crime, war, famine, poverty and pestilence, than it is to know that the planet Saturn has a ring, or that a lily has six stamens, that light can be polarized, or that potass can be decomposed. Yet while the latter propositions are susceptible of absolute demonstration, the former processes, which bear directly on human happiness or misery, are fre quently removed beyond our foresight or control. The wisest men often fail to influence the destinies of states, families, and individuals, and the shrewdest calculators are baffled in regard to a coming crop, apecuniary crisis, a glut in the commercial market, or a change in the public morals. Nevertheless, the wise man conscious of superior talent, and the phi lanthropist desirous of the public weal, and even the interested man who looks to his personal advantage and progress, must give themselves and their energies to studies which involve the immediate wants of their fellow-men, even though their best directed efforts should fail of the desired results. And the simple reason is, that if the best qualified minds decline to undertake this task, it will most assuredly be assumed by the ignorant and presumptuous.

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