Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Lecture, Introductory to a Course, on Surgery, in the University of Pennsylvania: Containing a Short Account of Eminent British Surgeons, Physicians, Scientific and Literary Men, Delivered October 22, 1847
Ihad long entertained similar opinions. Some of my earliest im pressions had been derived from Europe. There my medical education had, as it were, commenced and terminated. Many of the friends of my youth were still there. To see and hold converse with them; to repeat a visit I had made some eight years since, from which I had derived so much pleasure and so many advantages; to see other parts of Europe I had not seen before; to benefit my own health, naturally robust, but which had suffered more or less from the wear and tear of arduous professional duties and anxieties, from which no man can entirely escape in any country; but above all, from an ardent wish to promote your interests, by culling for you, from every medical plant and ?ower, the choicest fruits and sweets and presenting them to you in what I trust will prove an acceptable form - have I commenced and finished the tour of which I propose to furnish, in one or more discourses, a full account, trusting that every allowance will be made for this first, at least, when I inform you that it has been put together within the last twelve days, amidst the distracting din and jar of steam-engines, the tumult and boisterous mirth of a crowd of men, women and children, or the depressing inquie tude of a host of others, suffering under the most horrible of all inno cent maladies, sea-sickness, during a stormy passage of three thousand miles across the Atlantic. This much, at least, I may say in anticipa tion, that my whole tour has proved a most agreeable and instructive one; that, during my sojourn in England, in France, in Belgium, in Germany, and in Holland, I have devoted myself almost exclusively to medical concerns, have almost lived in hospitals, in medical schools, in museums, in the work-shops of instrument-makers, in the society of the first physicians, surgeons, professors, lecturers, and scientific men the world contains; that from most of these I have received the kind est and most unwearied attentions; that many of them presented me with their most valuable books, or put me in the way of obtaining the choicest preparations and instruments suitable for class demonstrations, all which are at this moment either in my possession, or safely arrived at other ports, and at my immediate disposal; that, upon the whole, I may state I have seen a vast deal during the last few months, gained a vast deal, recovered my health and strength entirely, feel like a new man, or rather as light and corky as a boy, am ready to enter heart and soul upon my lectures, to teach you all I know, to show and ex plain to you all I have procured at great labor and expense - and yet that one difficulty remains, and this not easily overcome. I cannot give you, for example, in a single lecture, the tenth part of all I have seen; I Cannot inform you, in the same space, of all you wish to know; I cannot tell you how to proceed, when you go to Europe(7)
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