each other, and which can not be understood or appreciated by general society, neither the subject-matter of such differences nor the adjudication of the arbitrators should be made public, as publicity in a case of this nature may be personally injurious to the individuals concerned, and can hardly fail to bring discredit on the faculty.

ARTICLE VII.-OF PECUNIARY ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Some general rules should be adopted by the faculty, in every town or district, relative to pecuniary acknowledgments from their patients; and it should be deemed a point of honor to adhere to these rules with as much uniformity as varying circumstances will admit.

CHAPTER III. Of the DUTIES OF THE PROFESSION TO THE PUBlic, and of thE OBLIGATIONS of the Public TO THE PROFESSION

ARTICLE 1.-DUTIES OF THE PROFESSION TO THE PUBLIC

SECTION 1.-As good citizens, it is the duty of physicians to be very vigilant for the welfare of the community, and to bear their part in sustaining its institutions and burdens; they should also be ever ready to give counsel to the public in relation to matters especially appertaining to their profession, as on subjects of medical police, public hygiene and legal medicine. It is their province to enlighten the public in regard to quarantine regulations; the location, arrangement and dietaries of hospitals, asylums, schools, prisons, and similar institutions; in relation to the medical police of towns, as drainage, ventilation, etc.;

and in regard to measures for the prevention of epidemic and contagious diseases; and when pestilence prevails, it is their duty to face the danger, and to continue their labors for the alleviation of the suffering, even at the jeopardy of their own lives.

SEC. 2.-Medical men should also be always ready, when called on by the legally constituted authorities, to enlighten coroners' inquests and courts of justice on subject strictly medical-such as involve questions relating to sanity, legitimacy, murder by poison or other violent means, and in regard to the various other subjects embraced in the science of Medical Jurisprudence. But in these cases, and especially where they are required to make a post-mortem examination, it is just, in consequence of the time, labor and skill required, and the responsibility and risk they incur, that the public should award them a proper honorarium.

SEC. 3.-There is no profession by the members of which eleemosynary services are more liberally dispensed than the medical, but justice requires that some limits should be placed to the performance of such good offices. Poverty, professional brotherhood, and certain of the public duties referred to in the first section of this article, should always be recognized as presenting valid claims for gratuitous services; but neither institutions endowed by the public or by rich individuals, societies for mutual benefit, for the insurance of lives or for analogous purposes, nor any profession or occupation, can be admitted to possess such privilege. Nor can it be justly expected of physicians to

furnish certificates of inability to serve on juries, to perform militia duty, or to testify to the state of health of persons wishing to insure their lives, obtain pensions, or the like, without a pecuniary acknowledgment. But to individuals in indigent circumstances, such professional services should always be cheerfully and freely accorded.

SEC. 4.—It is the duty of physicians, who are frequent witnesses of the enormities committed by quackery, and the injury to health and even destruction of life caused by the use of quack medicines, to enlighten the public on these subjects, to expose the injuries sustained by the unwary from the devices and pretensions of artful empirics and impostors. Physicians ought to use all the influence which they may possess, as professors in Colleges of Pharmacy, and by exercising their option in regard to the shops to which their prescriptions shall be sent, to discourage druggists and apothecaries from vending quack or secret medicines, or from being in any way engaged in their manufacture and sale.

ARTICLE II.-OBLIGATIONS OF THE PUBLIC TO PHYSICIANS.

SECTION 1. The benefits accruing to the public, directly and indirectly, from the active and unwearied beneficiaries of the profession, are so numerous and important that physicians are justly entitled to the utmost consideration and respect from the community. The public ought likewise to entertain a just appreciation of medical qualifications; to make a proper discrimination between true science and the assumptions of ignorance and empiricism;

to afford every encouragement and facility for the acquisition of medical education—and no longer to allow the statute books to exhibit the anomaly of exacting knowledge from physicians, under a liability to heavy penalties, and of making them obnoxious to punishment for resorting to the only means of obtaining it.

III

REMARKS ON THE NATIONAL SYSTEM

ONE perusal is scarcely sufficient, even to the most attentive reader, for mentally grasping and fully appreciating all of the many wise and salutary provisions of this comprehensive system of medical morals. It should be scrutinised chapter by chapter, article by article, section by section, sentence by sentence, so that the student can eventually create in his mind an index including all the parts and phrases to which he may have to refer.

Notwithstanding the excellence of this system of morals, it has been vehemently opposed by certain physicians; some of their specious allegations being that it is "an encroachment on their rights as citizens; that they wished to free themselves from its bondage which had held them in the most degrading subjection—a kind of moral slavery --and that their struggle was for liberty, etc. It was suggested by a contemporary writer that such "struggle" seemed more like a struggle for licence than liberty, for, the National system of morals advocates unlimited liberty to do good, while it grants no licence to evil doers. They further sophistically alleged that the provisions of the system being so frequently violated, the