Regarded as a mere trade, the practice of physic requires but little skill, the qualities best suited for ensuring a prosperous career having no necessary connexion with intellect or science; an imposing manner, confident pretension, verbose declamation, interlarded with high-sounding terms, no matter how unintelligible or unmeaning; unhesitating assurances of cure; condemnation of whatever antecedent practitioners had done; these, and various other still less worthy arts, will suffice to gain a reputation sufficient to satisfy the cupidity of whoever can descend so low as to resort to them. It is ignorance only that can be thus misled; and, unhappily, this ignorance in all that regards the well-being of the body, and the maintenance or restoration of health, pervades all classes of the community to the highest. Strange! that while every other branch of knowledge is studied with increasing assiduity, and becoming daily more widely diffused, even the most intellectual classes of society are content to remain in utter ignorance of the mechanism and functions of their own frames. They are hence the ready dupes of every impostor, being wholly incapable of forming any just estimate of medical talent. Happy will it be for the legitimate sons of science, when a knowledge of the animal economy becomes so appreciated as to constitute a necessary branch of liberal education. Then, and not before, will genuine science and sound talent find their proper level; then will science be cultivated with more steady and effective zeal, the encouragement of just appreciation being necessary for the support of those who labour for its advancement.
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