toward him, and inquired into the means of making a chemical analysis and investigation of their various medical and economical properties. A frank, encouraging, and didactic courtesy was paid to each pupil, and by an original, but abrupt, and peculiarly forcible and impressive kind of instruction each, in his turn, was furnished with the information he asked.

As I was informed this was the hour of lecture, I took a proffered seat, and determined to avail myself of the opportunity of ascertaining whether this professor (for such I now ascertained he was) of the medical school was as eminent in his branch of knowledge as the other two decidedly were in their province. I was not long kept in suspense, for he commenced punctually at his hour, in a clear, concise, and lucid manner, a discourse on the method of making some of the mineral preparations of physic, and, by a strain of didactic precision, sustained and enforced by adroit experiments, arrested the attention of his hearers to a lecture on medical chemistry. He seemed particularly to feel the necessity of, and ably insisted on, the medical application of the subject, enforcing it with so much energy that I could at once realize the importance of chemistry to a physician. I was pleased to learn that he succeeded in rendering his numerous classes enamored of his charming science; and many of them, I was told by my guide, became adepts in it. He finished his discourse by a few interesting experiments on fulminating mercury; but so tremendous was the crash succeeding one of the explosions of this substance that we were stunned with its effects and the clamor of the terrified students, and the whole laboratory being by this time enveloped in the smoke and vapor of the various experiments, everything was concealed from our view but the passage of exit through which we endeavored to force our way. The scene suddenly changed, and I found myself at the entrance of an extended pile of buildings of striking appearance, though mixed and faulty architecture.* A colossal statue of bronzed lead was conspicuously planted in its front, which represented, I understood from my guide, the great founder of the province in which the medical institution existed. Rows of lofty sycamore trees surrounded the walls and reared their stately heads even as high as the spires of the building; and when once we had passed the portal a showy and enticing garden, separated by a low portcullis on either side. from smaller and less decorated enclosures, invited my attention. The balustrades were entwined with odorous vines and relieved by hedges of terebinthinate shrubs, rather too formally planted, but adding, nevertheless, to the beauty of the spot. Choirs of

*The Pennsylvania Hospital. The statue, of course, is the one, still standing, of William Penn, presented in 1804 to the hospital by John Penn.

feathered songsters carolled their peals of grateful music from the highest branches of the sycamores, and the flowers, with foliage, threw around a fragrant and salubrious exhalation. Groups of young men habited in various costumes, indicating their congregation from different and distant lands, or sections of the same extended territory, were strolling in careless watchfulness of the portal; crowds thronged the vestibule of the great hall, through which a large garden in the rear of the building was discovered in perspective. All were busily sauntering to and fro with careless attention to the charms around them, and in evident expectation of some approaching event of importance.

I could no longer restrain my curiosity, and though I much feared my importuning interrogatories had fatigued my dignified and taciturn companion, I ventured to be again inquisitive as to the use and appropriation of this huge structure, and the cause of such a concourse of youths, among whom I could not help noticing many of those I had seen in the fields and the laboratory. "Can they be students?" said I; "and is this a place of recreation, a theatre, in which some favorite comedy is to be acted? or is it a lounging athenæum which allures, by the richness and variety of its light reading, these youths to its rooms?" "You are right in your conjecture as to the young men," rejoined my pioneer, "but this is not, as you suppose, a place of amusement or diversion. It is a hospital, the receptacle of every kind of disease interesting to students of medicine and surgery. But to them it is quite as alluring as any place of amusement, owing to the felicity they enjoy of hearing clinical lectures from the most learned and eloquent physician of our new country. I also perform a part in this scene; for in this building all my capital operations are executed, in a splendid theatre, constructed to accommodate many hundreds of these diligent and inquiring youths. Thus they learn practical surgery, without an opportunity of seeing which all didactic closet instruction loses half its weight. But be patient; anon I will conduct you thither, for this very day I have two operations of great importance to perform, and those pupils whom you there see (for we had now entered the hall) will attend." Some were loading themselves with books from the library of this fine institution, others examining surgical instruments and dressings, and a few scrutinizing the aspect of medicines arranged in the druggery of the establishment. They are all," said he, "the common pupils of the great clinical teacher I have mentioned, the botanist, the chemist, and myself. But mark the movement of the students who throng the lobbies of the hall leading to the wards! This indicates that our Sydenham has arrived at the seat of his willing and instructive labors; and they

are impatiently crowding around the sick bedside to insure a hearing of his sage and invaluable practical remarks."*

At this moment my attention was arrested by a tall and very slender but venerable old gentleman, habited in drab-colored clothes, who walked toward the sick wards with a quick step, his hands folded before him, among flocks of pupils eager to catch his words. A slight passing introduction to him by my guide gave me an opportunity of seeing in his physiognomy the wise, the watchful, the thoughtful physician; and his conversation evinced the same degree of earnestness or even enthusiasm which had been so remarkable in the other professors in their respective departments. His aquiline, large, and rounded nose, insensibly gliding into his upper lip, gave a peculiar degree of penetrating expression to his face. His silvered locks indicated that his words of instruction had been the product of experience; indeed, I learned that he had for more than thirty years gratuitously served that establishment by his counsel, his attendance, and his skill. His eye was small, quickly moving, and full of genius; his voice full-toned, flexible, and soothing, and his manners possessed an irresistible charm equally felt by his patients, his companions, his pupils, and his friends. I followed for an hour the train which hung on his practical remarks, and could easily discern how allimportant a branch was this clinical instruction, when I found him at one moment jesting with the hypochrondriac, soothing the melancholy, and recurving the morbid apprehensions and associations of the crazed with equal ability and success, and practically applying his principles to the cure of their diseases. Courteous as a cavalier, after waiting until the operations of my guide were completed, which, owing to his adroitness and skill, was indeed but a few minutes, he placed me in his carriage and drove us both to the same building in which I had heard the chemical lecture. It was, he said, his day of clinical remarks, for by such modest title did he call a long, connected, lucid lecture on the causes, seats and cure of the different cases I had just witnessed in the hospital. He enlarged upon his treatment of those cases, explaining by them his peculiar principles; and such was the enthusiasm of this teacher, and his love of medical science, that when his hour was elapsed by a few minutes he craved, with his watch in his hand, the favor of "only one minute more "-a boon with how much cheerfulness granted was evidenced by the silence and decorum, the fixed attention of his hearers. When at length he had completed his subject he took leave with these remarkable words

* Benjamin Rush, who in 1808 was Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and of the Institutes of Medicine and Clinical Medicine. Born in 1745, he was therefore in 1808 sixty-three years old. He was on the staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital from May 26, 1783, until his death on April 19, 1813. He was celebrated for his punctuality, and it is said that during the whole of this period he never missed his daily visit, and was never more than ten minutes late. As everyone of course knows, he was called the American Sydenham.

addressed to his pupils: "Think, young men, read, reflect and judge for yourself!"*-a lesson which might safely and profitably be given to minds disciplined, like those of his pupils. in the legitimate school of practice, nature and observation.

In the rush of students which came from this sage's room I lost my guide, and became entangled in a labyrinth of corridors and lobbies, each of which seemed to lead me still farther from the cbject of my search, and each becoming more obscure until I was finally lost in utter darkness. Faint and weary and overcome with disappointment and fear, together with the pain produced by too much exertion after the wound I had received on the shelving rocks when I was shipwrecked, I sank insensible on the floor, and when I awakened to a sense of my situation, so disinal and painful was it that I called peevishly on Death to come and carry me from a world of misery. Too readily did he obey; for, before the words had well escaped me, his skeleton figure, hideously grinning in my face, stood before me. Seeing the panic his presence produced, "Wretch," he cried, "why hast thou called me?" Terrified as I was, in vain did I urge that an hallucination of the fancy had caused me to pronounce his name and invoke his relief. In fact it was, I assured him, his desperate enemy I sought, having lost him in a crowd of young men, among whom I had taken a seat to listen to the precepts of an Aesculapian chief, who had strenuously instilled the lesson of resisting and contend- · ing with him whenever unhappily he should seem to be near, and never yield to him so long as medicinable arms and ammunition remained unexhausted. "Leave me, therefore," continued I, "for you must be convinced that, as I never could have learned respect for your power, nor been taught to call in your aid to procure relief in such company, a distempered imagination alone caused me to call on you." "Hypocrite," rejoined Death, seizing me, "hie thee with me to the haunts of these my cruel and implacable enemies, and I will show you by what means they contend against my power. It is by midnight robberies of my plunder that they fill their charnel houses; and, by examining with their wily arts the devastations I have made on the mortal frame, learn and teach their pupils--in whom they instil the same degree of hatred which they themselves possess how to oppose efficient force to my work, and to contend against my power. Among the deadliest of my foes is that guide of yours; and so implacable is he, and so interminable the warfare he has waged against me, that in my contest with him he will sever limbs asunder, and pluck the eyes from their orbits, ere he will surrender the body to my power. You will find him at his work; and as you are not ready for me, and as I know he is at hand to aid you, I must relinquish all claims to your

An oft-quoted remark of Rush.

body for the present. I will conduct you to your guide, and a coadjutor of his whom you have not yet seen; but, as I cannot remain an inhabitant of the same spot with either of those things, and do not like even to peep where they are, for fear of a blow on my poor, emaciated body, I shall leave you." So saying, he thrust me, terrified, into a dissecting-room and clapped the door upon my back.

As promised by Death, here I was greeted by my lost guide, who was instructing his pupils in the mode of removing limbs from the living body, by severing them from the dead. He immediately introduced me to a fat, florid, powdered, gay-looking gentleman of low stature and clumsy form, who appeared busy in directing other pupils in the arts of injecting the blood-vessels and in guiding their hands into the adroit method of examination of the body post-mortem.

(To be continued.)

LOCAL ANESTHESIA.

BY HORATIO C. WOOD, M.D., LL.D.

UNDER any circumstances the use of an anesthetic is accompanied by a very small but distinctly appreciable danger to life; a danger which, in the happenings of practical medicine and surgery, is often increased until it becomes very positive. A perfect anesthetic would be a substance which should act upon the peripheral sensory nerves and have no other influence upon the human organism. Such a substance has not as yet been discovered and it may be, does not exist in nature. The subject of local anesthesia is therefore one of great practical importance.

According to our present knowledge all attempts at the production of local anesthesia may be divided into two sets: those in which the loss of sensation is produced by paralysis of conducting nerve-fibres at a greater or less distance from the seat of pain, or proposed surgical operation; those in which the seat of pain is attacked immediately. For brevity's sake, we shall speak of the first of these subdivisions as neuritic anesthesia, the second as local anesthesia.

Neuritic anesthesia may be produced by injections of the local anesthetic into the vertebral column in such position as shall

Caspar Wistar was elected Professor of Anatomy after Dr. William Shippen's death, which occurred July 11, 1808. The exact date of Wistar's election was December 6, 1808; previous to that time he had been Adjunct Professor of Anatomy since 1792. He was a distinguished citizen of Philadelphia, best known to us now from his having been the founder of the museum that bears his name. He succeeded Thomas Jefferson as President of the Philosophical Society, and was also President of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. The genial, hospitable character of Dr. Wistar is evidenced by the custom of still holding the so-called "Wistar Parties."