changes, introducing several important improvements, and acquiring for himself new and unfading laurels. His good sense and experience had convinced him of the truth of the Horatian precept, so unwisely ignored in much of the teaching, religious and secular, of our day—
Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
a single glance, explaining and embodying the meaning, often imparting more accurate information, and making deeper impression, than whole hours of tedious and ill-understood description.[1] It is surprising that a truth, inherent in the very nature of man, should be so injuriously neglected by those whose peculiar province is education; and still more remarkable that Dr. Wood should actually have been the first in this country, and elsewhere also, to introduce into the chair of medicine the system of ocular demonstration. He had proved its utility and its superiority to the oral and didactic method then in vogue, while occupying the chair of materia medica; why should it not, he rightly thought, be equally useful, though perhaps more difficult of accomplishment, in teaching that to which the materia medica is merely subservient? In order the more fully to prepare for the new and arduous duties now devolved upon him, and with special reference to his intended system of instruction, he made a voyage to Europe, visited its most celebrated schools, and spent many thousands of dollars in the purchase of models, castings, and drawings of various pathological lesions. These formed a cabinet of morbid representations unique in this country, and supplied material for a course of medical tui-
Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus;—
- ↑ I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.—Job, xlii. 5.
