Three Lectures Preliminary to a Course on the Principles and
Practice of Surgery. Delivered on the Aih, 8th and 9th of Oct.,
1849, before the Medical Class of the University of Pennsyl-
vania. By William Gibson, M. D., LL. D., Professor of Sur-
gery, &c. Published by the Class. Philadelphia : 1850. pp. 57.
The season for valedictories from our medical professors is
already nigh at hand, yet we have still to regret the want of op-
portunity to return acknowledgments for the many interesting
introductories with copies of which we have been favored.
Thankful we sincerely are for each of these annual offerings
from the professorial rostra ; and we would be unfeignedly glad
to vary and enrich our pages with many portions of their polished
treasures, could we do so without trenching on the rights of more
urgent, although not more tempting, claimants. As it is, we have
surrendered, for the nonce, to Dr. Gibson’s three “ preliminary ”
lectures; not so much on account of the triple debt of gratitude
their numerical excess has put us under, as for the refreshing en-
tertainment their perusal has afforded us in the midst of melan-
choly heaps of drier food for thought.
They belong to a class of introductory discourses which must
always find a cordial welcome amongst all hearers and readers of
whatever predilections, and one which we of the company of official
lookers-on have many reasons for regarding with peculiar satis-
faction.
It is neither the information they convey, nor the agreeable form
in which their matter is presented, that renders essays of this kind
so eminently attractive in our view; nor is it the guaranty they
suggest of a desire on the part of their enterprising authors, to
master, at the fountain head and for the purposes of teaching, the
latest improvements in their respective branches. Strong as these
recommendations manifestly are, and great as we feel the charm
must be to him who can revel haud inexpertus in the thousand
glorious recollections roused by the graphic history of scenes and
persons once familiar to his daily sight—still we attach far higher
value to them for the sake of the powerful stimulus such stirring
pictures inevitably give to the pursuit of knowledge in the minds
of the embryo philosophers to whom they are especially addressed.
Nowhere can the ambitious student meet with a source of impulse
that would urge him so irresistibly to seek the means of future
advancement in a career of European observation and comparison;
and nowhere could he find a more effectual inducement to emulate
in his own land the most exalted efforts of the great intellects of
the older and more crowded world abroad.
But these occasional remarks are fast making away with the
space allotted for the special notice of the pamphlet which has given
rise to them. A very brief and cursory sketch is all that need be
given here of its particular contents; and we beg leave to refer to
the brochure itself for a better acquaintance with its scope and
character.
Suffice it to say, that the professor’s object was to present,
through his customary medium of introductories, a continuation of
his portraiture of the celebrated medical men and institutions of
England and the continent of Europe, noted by him in the course
of his last tour abroad. The three lectures now before us are
chiefly occupied with an account of the “ prominent medical men
and schools of Germany.”
Beginning with a lively coup d’ml of Aix La Chapelle, he
takes us most agreeably through Bonn and up the Rhine to Wies-
baden and Heidelberg. Sojourning at the last old town, we are
favored with a life-like view of its Tiedemann, his museum, his
works, his homes, his family, and his colleagues, Chelius, Henle,
Naegele and others—and thus endeth lecture first.
The second lecture is devoted, first to Liebig and his fellows,
Bischoff, Wehren and others at Giessen, and then to Muller, Dief-
fenbach, and some of their associates and doings and places of
resort at Berlin.
Lecture third carries us out of Germany into the land of dykes,
and canals, and inimitable pictures, since we are introduced
by way of Hamburg and the Zuyder Zee to Amsterdam with
its worthies, its lions and its works of art. Next we have
Leyden, with its famous university and anatomical collections;
then Harlem and the Hague, with its unrivalled gallery of Dutch
and Flemish paintings. Thence to Rotterdam, and out of Holland
to Antwerp, Brussels and Paris. Here, we are told, our author
took up his “abode again for several weeks, living the greater
part of the time in the hospitals and in the society of the most dis-
tinguished professional men. Of these,” continues he, “ I had fondly
hoped, before this, to have given a full account. But alas! owing to
constant and overwhelming engagements with lectures and pro-
fessional duties, I have been unable to fulfil, entirely, the promise
made to a former class. To make amends for this delinquency, I
propose, Deo volente, to print the ensuing summer a new edition
of my Rambles in Europe in 1839, and to add to it a full account
of my late pilgrimage in 1847—trusting that both, thus brought
forward in the shape of a volume, may not only prove instructive
and agreeable to students and practitioners throughout our country,
but serviceable, as a guide, to those who may be willing and able
hereafter to visit the scenes from which I myself have derived so
many advantages and so much satisfaction. In the meantime,
‘Vive vale que.’” We echo the wish. May he live a thousand years,
and may the shadow of his introductories never be less !