Excerpt from The Two Ways: An Address to the Graduating Class of Castleton Medical College, Delivered November 24, 1858

The title of Doctor has been so largely appropriated by itinerant lecturers, veterinary surgeons, quack-medicine venders, and the whole army of irregular quacks, that you will do well to drop it when traveling, lest, among strangers, your respectability should be called in question. As applied to the regularly licensed members of the profession, it signifies that the bearer has been a medical student, and has, in due course of time, received his diploma, opened an office and commenced practice. To the minds of the initiated and the better informed classes of the public, this is the full extent of its present meaning. It would be an interest ing and not uninstructive exercise to trace out the various causes which have, each in their peculiar way, led to the great change which has taken place in the signification of this distinctive title. The low standard of preliminary education, the multiplicity of medical colleges and their consequent rivalry, the immigration of apothecary-doctors and mere surgeons, the small distinction which the public make between the learned and unlearned, the regular and the quack in the choice of a physician, (perhaps the frightful increase in the number of those in a sister profession who receive a corresponding title, ) these and many other causes might be men tioned as having contributed to bring about the result. But a more important cause than either or all of these named may be found in the fact that so many graduates cease to be students, if they ever were such, when they attain the doctorate and turn their whole attention to their mere pecuniary advancement. Science is neglected for the practice of petty arts, and losing all aspirations for anything higher than a popular reputation, they soon fall to the dead level of the mere doctor, and deserve no higher considera tion than is accorded to that equivocal title.

The term Physician has, for manifest reasons, escaped, to a great extent, the unfortunate fate of its fellow; and having a more exclusive application and fewer vulgar associations, still preserves an odor of scholarship.

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