We do not know whether the book which has occasioned this article signifies the decay either of ethics or of (what its writer calls) “medicine” ; or of both ethics and medicine, for without a doubt it signifies a decay. A profession such as “medicine,” which deals with the human ultimates of birth, marriage, and death, has an ethical import which might well exercise the genius of a modern Thomas Browne. We must not be taken to indulge in personalities but rather to criticize a state of things and a state of learning if we look upon this work of an Edinburgh Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence as a pathological specimen which we must patiently diagnose and treat.

It is the sub-title that reveals the unhealthy state of things. The book is entitled Medical Conduct and Practice. This is a sufficiently general title to cover the contents of the book ; and to allow the author to give shrewd advice to his Scottish medical readers on “how to get on in the world.”

But this non-committal title has the sub-title “A Guide to the Ethics of Medicine.” To most of us whom a University has befriended in youth, the word Ethics recalls that highest branch of Philosophy which the Greeks elaborated in order to endow Christian thought. We recall the Ethics of Aristotle, with many regrets that the true wisdom of that book is now a quarry for the philologist rather than for the philosopher. But the word Ethics stirs up such deep emotions in our heart that we are at expectation’s end to see what will be said of it by a modern brother of him who wrote Religio Medici, and especially by one of those accepted few who have sitten in the chair of Medicine near Arthur’s Seat.