While clinical experience is not everything in medicine, it is so much more important than any other single factor in the physician's equipment, that I would hesitate, before a hospital staff with such a large service as that of the New York Lying-in Hospital to express views, or advocate measures, which must have been formed or adopted by all of us in pretty much the same shape to meet the exigencies of our kind of practice. It is profitable however, occasionally to contemplate the present status of any of the broad divisions of medicine, to study critically the achievements of the past, the possibilities and limitations of the present and the probable direction of future progress.
It is to the last particularly, that I shall attempt to call attention. No single branch of medicine is standing still for a moment. The Scotch surgeon and the American obstetrician who, in final