1873. ]873. 1873. IN the course of the year upon which we have now entered THE LANCET will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its existence. The beginning of a new year seems a fitting time-more fitting perhaps, in some respects, than the actual anniversary itself-at which to look back over the period that has elapsed since 1823, and to consider in what respects the interval has been fruitful of good as regards the progress of the healing art, and as regards the essential well-being of those

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... who practise it. The limits of space within which custom confines us will preclude the possibility of extending such a review into matters of detail; but these will either follow, or at least may be easily conceived, from even a mere enumeration of some of the more salient features of the case. Speaking broadly, it may be said that fifty years ago professional knowledge was a private and individual rather than a public and widely diffused possession. The eminent men who, by dint of great gifts and unceasing labour, had come to be recognised as masters of their craft, were hindered in their desire freely to disseminate the treasures of their experience and their erudition, and were so hindered partly by the absence of easy and recognised channels of publicity, and chiefly by the mistaken views of inferior men, colleagues who had been placed in hospital offices by nepotism or by payment, and who shrank, like the quacks of our own day, from imparting to others the weapons by which they trusted to win a way to tortune for themselves. At that time medicine and surgery were still mysteries" and the hospitals, their temples, were closed to all who had not paid the necessary fee, and at all periods which that fee did not cover. The lectures of the great men, comparatively seldom embodied in books, were indeed taken down more or less completely by some of the members of their classes, but even then they were guarded with jealous care against publication. A scientific discovery, a new medicine, a new method of treatment, or a new theory of disease, remained for months or years the property of a small number of persons, used or tested perhaps only within the walls of a single hospital, or within the still narrower circle of one man's practice, and communicated only in casual conversation, or in the correspondence that the postage of the time rendered both meagre and infrequent. The Scotch lassie who heard that the QUEEN had taken chloroform at her accouchement, and who marvelled that the precious drug had 11 gotten sae far sooth," would have had, fifty years ago, some cause for her astonishment ; and such innovations as the antiseptic treatment of wounds, the cure of aneurism by compression, or the resection of joints in preference to the amputation of limbs, might have remained for an indefinite time the peculiarities of some single and circumscribed locality. We have taken our illustrations from surgery, but the same circumstances were in operation with respect to medicine also; and they furnish a reasonable explanation of the fact that certain agents which we now highly value-