Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from An Address, Delivered Before the Medical Society of Tennessee, at Its Eighth Annual Meeting at Nashville, on the 7th of May, 1838
But I consume the time of the Society with stale truisms. Since they were recognized, and anatomy assumed the rank of paramount importance due to it as the basis of medicine, the profession has gone forward with a celerity unknown to any former age. The greatest improvements have beer made within the last thirty years, and are especially due to pathological anatomy. Hospitals and autopsies ushered in the new era, since which the science has advanced with a sure and vigorous step. A broader and clearer light has been beaming upon its philosophy, and greater certainty, safety and efficiency have been given to its practice. Human and comparative anatomy explaining the functions in a state of health, and the inspection of the dead body revealing the character of disease, while an extended and greatly improved chemistry has enriched its resources, medicine at the present day appears a new science, or an old one instinct with a more rational principle.
It is among the curious facts with which history abounds, that this change was favored and accelerated by causes quite foreign to medicine, and which seemed at the time as hostile to science as to humanity. In the wars which for twenty years deluged Europe in blood, we find one of the chief impulses which led on to this revolution. The campaigns of Napoleon opened to his physicians schools of practical anatomy such as the world had not yet beheld, and his all-grasping mind embraced every interest which involved the fame of his country. The savans of the Republic made a part of the grand army, and traversed the earth with his resistless legions. The genius of science ?ew with his eagles from sea to sea, and collected treasures under every path of the sun. Medicine is enriched by the records of what his philosophers observed at the foot of the pyramids, and amid the Pontine marshes - under the burning sun of Syria, ah'
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