The Monitor-register., 1897-06-11
| PRAISE OF DOCTORS.
REV. DR.. TALMAGE PAYS A HIGH TRIB-
+ uTETO THE MEDICAL PROFESSION.

the Gout, and Shows Why the Doctors
Could Not Cure Him-Piety and Medical
Skill.
NEW YORK, June Cit is not often
that men of one profession have much
encouragement for men Of another pro-
fession, but this sermon prepared by
DR. Talmage contains enthusiastic
words of clergyman to physicians. The
text is II Chronicles xvi, IL, 13, "And
Asa, in,the thirty and ninth year of his
reign, was diseased in his feet until his
disease was exceeding great, yet in his
disease he sought not to the Lord, but
to the physicians. And Asa slept with
his fathers. -
At this season of the year, when
medical colleges of all schools of medi-
cine, are giving diplomas to young doc
torsy and at the capital and in many
of the cities medical associations are as
sembling to consult about the advance
meHt of the interests of their profess
sion, feel this discourse is appropriate.
King Asas Gout.
In my text is King Asa with the
gout. High living and no exercise have
initiated his blood, and my text presents
him with his infiamed and bandaged
feet Oh an ottoman. In defiance of God,
whom he hated, he sends for certain
conjurors or quacks. They come and
give him all sorts of lotions and pana-
ceas They bleed him. They sweat him.
They manipulate him. They blister
him. They poultice him. They scarify
him. They, drug him. They cut him.
They kill him. He was only young
man and had disease which, though
very painful, seldom proves fatal to
young man, and he ought to have got
we'll, but he fell a victim to charlatan-
ry and empiricism. "And Asa in the
thirty and ninth year Of his reign was
diseased in bis feet until his disease
was exceeding great, yet in his disease
he sought not to the Lord, but to the
physicians And Asa slept with his IA
Tiers" That is, the doctors killed him.
In this sharp and graphic way the
Bible sets forth the truth, that you have
no right to shut God out from the realm
Of pharmacy and therapeutics. If Asa
ndu Edtu. " Lulu, SiOhs 11iSoo
the instrumentality employed for my
recovery. "Now, servant, go and get
the best doctor you can find ''-he would
have recovered. In other words, the
world wants divinely directed physi-
clans. There are great many such.
The diplomas they received from the
academies of medicine were nothing
compared with the diploma they re-
ceived from the Head Physician of the
universe on the day when they started
out and he said to them, $50 heal the
sick and cast out the devils of pain and
open the blind eyes and unstop the deaf
ears. God bless the doctors all the
world over. and let all the hospitals and
dispensaries and infrmaries and asyIums
and domestic circles of the earth re-
spond. "Amen.
Men of the medical profession we Of
ten meet in the home of distress We
shake hands across the cradle of ago
nized infancy. We join each other in an
attempt at solace where the paroxysm
of grief demands an anodyne as well as
a prayer. We look into each others
sympathetic faces through the dusk as
the night of death is falling III the sick
room. We do not have to climb over
any barrier today in order to greet each
other, for our professions are in full
sympathy. You, doctor, are our first
and last earthly friend. You stand at
the gates of life when we enter this
world and you stand at the gates of
death when we go out of it. In the clos
ing moments of our earthly existence,
when the hand of the wife or mother or
sister or daughter shall hold our right
hand, it will give strength to cur dying
moment if we can feel the tips Of your
fingers along the pulse of the left wrist.
We do not meet today, as on other days,
in houses of distress, but by the pleasant
altars of God, and propose sermon
of helpfulness and good cheer. AS in
the nursery children sometimes enact
all the scenes of the sickroom, SO today
you play that you are the patient and
that l am the physician, and take my
prescription just once. 1t shall be q
tonic, sedative, dietetic disinfect
amt, stimulus and an anodyne at the
same time. lis there not balm in Gil
cad? Is there not physician there?"
An Honorable Calling.
In the first place, I think all the med
ical profession should become Christians
because of the debt of gratitude they
owe to God for the honor he has put
upon their calling. No other calling il
all the world, except it be that of the
Christian ministry, has received sc
great an honor as yours. Christ himself
was not only preacher, but physician,
surgeon, aurist, ophthalmologist, and
under his mighty power optic and au-
dftory nerve thrilled with light and
sound, and catalepsy arose from its fit,
and the clubfoot was Strengthened, and
anchylosis went out Of the stiffened ten
dons, and the foaming maniac became
placid as child, and the streets Of Je-
rqsalem became an extemporized hospi-
tai crowded with convalescent victims
Of casualty and invalidism. All ages
have woven the garland for the doctor
brow. Homer said:
A wise physician, skilled our wounds to heal
Is more than armies to the public veal.
Cicero said, "There is nothing in
which men so approach the gods as
when they try to give health to other
men," Charles TX made proclamation
that all the Protestants in France should
be put to death on st. Bartholomew s
day. but made one exception, and that
the case of Pare, the father of French
surgery. The battlefelds of the Amer
ican revolution welcomed Drs. Mercer
and Warren and Rush. When the French
army Was entirely demoralized by fear
of the plague, the leading surgeon of
that army inoeulated himself with the
plague to show the soldiers there was
no contagion in it, and their courage
rose, and they went on to the conflict.
God has honored this profession all the
way through. Oh, the advancement
from the days when Hippocrates tried
to cure the great Pericles with hellebore
and flaxseed poultices down to far later
centuries when Haller announced the
theory of respiration, and Harvey the
circulation of the blood, and Asceli the
uses Of the lymphatic vessels, and Jen-
ner baked the worst disease that ever
Scourged Europe, and Sydenham devel-
oped the reouperative forces of the ply
sical organism, and cinchona bark stop
ped the shivering agues of the world,
and Sir Ashley Cooper and Abernethy,
and Hosack and Romeyn, and Griscom
and Valentine Mott, of the generation
just past, honored God and fought back
death with their keen scalpels.
If we who are laymen in medicine
would understand what the medical
profession has accomplished for the in
sane, let us look into the dungeons
where the poor creatures used to, be in
arcerated-madmen chained naked tC