! PREFACE. In reflecting upon a suitable subject for an introductory lecture, after accepting of the Professorship of Surgery in the University of this city, with which I was honoured before my return from abroad, I knew of nothing that seemed more appropriate than a summary of the general observations which I had made on the progress and condition of medicine and surgery in the different countries I had visited during my six years' absence. I found, however, that, to do justice to the theme I had proposed, it expanded to such volume on matters of miscellaneous interest to the general reader as well as on those strictly professional, that it might more properly assume the form of a book of travels. In Great Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, it will be perceived that I have studiously avoided touching upon those tedious and trite subjects which have been completely worn threadbare by guide-books and tourists, and become repugnant and insipid by their repetition. My attention has been confined, in those countries named, almost exclusively to subjects of more special and piquant interest in my own profession. Instead of dilating on castles and cathedrals, palaces and parliaments, crowns and coronets, chateaus and courtiers, peers and princes, the military or commercial power, and statistical condition of this or that people, I have selected a theme which more deeply interests the welfare of the whole human race, and appeals more directly to all the sympathies and charities of the heart than anything which is purely political, or which relates merely to that artificial state of society which constitutes the difference between one nation, or form of government, and another. The healing art is one which concerns alike the whole human family; and wherever I have travelled I have endeavoured to study the masses of population in all those physical and social relations, habits, and customs, mental and corporeal pursuits, localities and climates, which might seem to me to suggest anything curious or useful, in illustrating the progress and present condition of the most useful of sciences, that which may remove or relieve human suffering, and add to the general amount of human happiness in every part of the earth. While, therefore, the first third of this book, under the heads of Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, will be found to embrace almost exclusively matters seldom dwelt upon by tourists, and that relate to medical science and to details of interviews with some of the more extraordinary individuals of my profession, and visits to the more celebrated hospitals and medical schools; it will be perceived that, as we advance into the more ancient countries of Southern Europe and the East, the degraded condition of medicine there, and the consequent prevalence of various endemial and epidemic diseases which have thereby become almost hereditary among those enslaved nations, furnish again occasion to revert to the prouder epochs of their history in bygone ages, and which are vividly recalled to us in the magnificent and classic ruins which they have left as monuments of the elevated intellectual and social rank which they once had reached. In the greater and concluding portion of this volume, therefore, which comprises Italy, Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Turkey, it will be found that professional subjects necessarily occupy but a very limited space, and that we have consequently dwelt upon those objects in that part of the world which so intensely absorb and captivate all who make a pilgrimage thither to mourn over the ruins of a land that was once adorned by the most powerful and polished nations that ever existed. At every step some vast edifice, some shattered column or mouldering temple, some pointed obelisk or towering pyramid, furnishes a theme for fruitful meditation, and admonishes us of the transitory duration of human glory. They foretel that the same sceptre of power and of civilization which has passed from the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, from Cambyses and Xerxes, and Alexander and Titus, and the Cæsars and the Caliphs-which descended successively to the Egyptian, the Mede, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman, and the Saracen, ultimately into the possession of Northern and Western Europe-will, in all probability, continue its onward course to this other and American hemisphere, to whom, next to Western Europe, seems to be assigned the destiny to become the inheritors of the unextinguished and unextinguishable and Divine light of mental and of moral culture, but which may again depart from us to be revived once more in that benighted Eastern Asia, which was, perhaps, the first cradle of its existence. When I left my country, the impaired state of my health too much occupied me to suppose that I should ever have it in my power to undergo the perils and fatigues, the severe personal sufferings, in fact, from climate, want of food, and every comfort, which I found myself, as I advanced in my travels, more and more capable of enduring. My nerves became strengthened and hardened, in truth, by these privations; and to this, therefore, am I indebted for being enabled now to present some of the fruits of the trials and dangers which I cheerfully and voluntarily submitted to, and which I hope may not prove unacceptable to my countrymen. The following observations, which comprise the exordium of the introductory lecture to which I have alluded, will explain the object of my visit abroad, and the fortunate issue which it had in the restoration of my health. INTRODUCTION. THROUGH the favour of a Divine and Superintending Providence, which has protected me in my long absence, and restored me to health, am I indebted for this opportunity of addressing myself to my fellow-citizens. To my countrymen, in truth, am I placed under lasting obligations for their very kind and flattering opinion of me; and to this, doubtless, am I greatly indebted for the many courtesies extended towards me during my residence abroad. Their sympathies for me, when my health and energies were overtasked by laborious professional duties, tended to cheer my darkest hours of despondency, in whatever land or clime I travelled or sojourned. The efficacy of foreign travel, as a remedial measure, is felt in a particular manner in that distressing class of maladies commonly known as Nervous Diseases. They are, for the most part, imputable to exhausted excitability, from over exertion of the mental and corporeal faculties, undermining that primary source of life, of sensation, and motion-the brain. The pressure of unremitted and severe application had, in my own case, wrought a dangerous dilapidation of all the vital forces. The digestive organs partook largely of the general debility; and, as is usual in such cases, a train of alarming symptoms were produced, which closely counterfeited, by sympathetic influence, all the phenomena of radical organic disease. Though our medical judgment, under such circumstances, may come to the full conviction that no serious lesion or injury of an organic character exists, and that the symptoms may be legitimately deducible solely from those of an atonic or debilitated condition of the nervous functions, yet is the fac-simile to real disease so ex |