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versant in practice. Seeing the life and health of mankind is the object of medicine, ignorance of the practice is a grand defect in a Physician, and an unpardonable crime, as attended with irreparable injuries.
The great extent of medical science, which comprehends under it so many different branches, makes it impossible to learn it thoroughly without we follow a certain order. Whilst we neglect this, all our ideas are but crude conceptions, a rope of sand, without any firm connection. Should the student, as chance or whim might direst, sometimes apply himself to one branch, sometimes to another; or read indiscriminately even the best authors on the different parts of Medicine; for want of method, all his knowledge would be superficial; though he might take as much pains as would suffice to make him eminently skillful, had he from the beginning pursued a well concerted plan. What progress could we make in Mathematics, if we did not proceed step by step, and in a certain order?
The knowledge of the more intricate and hidden truths of science are to be developed by degrees. We can only arrive at them by the assistance of other more obvious truths, which they are connected with, and which lead us to them by a certain chain of facts, observations, and just deductions in a train
