comfort. Thousands have gone forth instructed by his living counsel to wage their holy warfare against disease and death; and far other thousands have drawn from his works the inspiration, and from his armory the weapons, which enabled them to achieve success in their arduous conflict.[1] The victories of peace surpass those of war, in that, inflicting no wound and causing no sorrow, they are productive of unmingled good; and, judging by this standard, the College of Pharmacy in its obituary memorial rightly describes Dr. Wood as one of the great men of the world.
The Chair of Practice, which was the goal of his aspirations, he voluntarily resigned after a self-imposed restriction of ten years, in the full possession of his mental powers, and with all his capability for labor unimpaired.[2] It was not, as we all know, to indulge in idle and inglorious ease. The field of knowledge is illimitable, and Dr. Wood was always actively in favor of progress and reform. He continued therefore to read and to write with the same diligence and energy as before. The successive editions of his works required constant supervision to keep pace with the wonderful accumulation of new facts, and with the constantly widening horizon of science, which "like the circle bounding earth and skies" is ever receding as it is approached. The institutions with which he was connected—the Philosophical Society, the College of Physicians—these and a variety of other matters employed his time and his pen, and furnished abundant
- ↑ Of his three most important publications—the Dispensatory, the Theory and Practice of Medicine, and the Treatise on Therapeutics—the sales respectively, have been 120,000, 36,000, and 12,000 copies. The aggregate of his published writings exceeds 7000 8vo. pages.
- ↑ Hé bien! qu'est ce que cela, soixante ans? C'est la fleur de l'age, cela.—Molière.
