With the Compliments of 
Henry O. Marcy 
PERSONAL SERVICE 
AS THE ESPECIAL EXPONENT 
OF A GREAT PROFESSION Personal Service 
As the Especial Exponent 
Of a Great Profession 
BY 
HENRY O. MARCY, A. M., M. D., LL. D. 
OF BOSTON, U. S. A. 
Surgeon to the Cambridge Hospital for IVomen; late President of the 
American Medical Association ; President of the Section of Gynecol- 
ogy, Ninth International Medical Congress; late President of the 
A merican A cademy of Medicine; Member of the British 
Medical A ssociation ; Member of the Massachusetts Medi- 
cal Society ; Member of the Boston Gynecological So- 
ciety ; Corresponding Member of the Medico-Chi- 
rurgical Society of Bologna, Italy ; late 
Surgeon U. S. A. ; etc. 
[REPRINTED FROM THE BOSTON MEDICAL AND SURGICAL 
JOURNAL OF SEPTEMBER 26, 1895.] 
BOSTON 
DAMRELL & UPHAM, Publishers 
283 Washington Street 
1895 PERSONAL SERVICE AS THE ESPECIAL EX- 
PONENT OF A GREAT PROFESSION.1 
BY HENRY O. MARCY, A.M., M.D., LL.D. 
As we stand by the opening door of the twentieth 
century, we would gladly draw aside the curtain and 
forecast for present profit something which the experi- 
ence of the coming decades will have in store. 
To the graduates of to-day, how interesting the 
vision ! 
From henceforth life is seen by you through a new 
medium. 
We have witnessed the ceremonies as interested 
spectators. You have approached the sacred altar 
and taken upon yourselves the vows to-day, which 
from this time, set you apart for a special service. 
From nothing, which the demands of an intelligent 
citizenship places upon her supreme rulers, are you 
exempt, but in addition have you openly accepted new 
duties, new obligations, which are fraught with the 
heaviest of responsibilities. Wedded to the profession 
of your deliberate choosing, it becomes our pleasing 
privilege to bestow the benediction, as you emerge 
from your faithful apprenticeship. To your beloved 
teachers these annual graduations are interesting 
occasions; but to you it is the culminating point in 
the life-history which has no repetition. 
Do we, your elders, not remember it ? Years, few 
or many, are not sufficient to intervene, which do not 
place us to-night upon a level of common interest and 
sympathy. New recruits in this great army, you have 
1 Delivered at the Annual Commencement of the College of Medi- 
cine of Syracuse University, June 6, 1895. 4 
been given the countersign, and the query at once 
arises, 
What shall the service be ? 
Of what shall it profit me, 
May I the future see 
Of success a certainty! 
The parable of the talents, as given by the Great 
Master, may be read to-night in a new light, the law 
of self-interest governed by a new force. Life is a 
bank into which we make a daily deposit of service 
rendered to others, against the value of which we may 
freely draw, as our own, the entire credit for personal 
benefit. 
If this is true, the acquisition of the means for 
deposit is the one subject of absorbing iuterest, for are 
we not agreed that personal ueeds are likely to con- 
tinue very pressing, and that educated men are expen- 
sive animals! 
“ How I may best serve others as the especial ex- 
ponent of a great profession,” might seem the fitting 
topic of the hour upon which to address you. 
Is it that you are to treat the rank and file of suffer- 
ing humauity as bad priests of the mother church give 
absolution to suppliants, who accept the same without 
thought of a regenerative life, and thus you dole out 
bitter potions of doubtful drugs in answer to “ What 
shall 1 take for my cure?” rather than sit as the real 
high priest of our most noble calling and teach the 
violation of physical laws and the means of their har- 
monic restoration ! 
Remember while you reverently profit by all the 
lessons of revealed religion, that you are the more 
rather than the less, the teacher of natural laws, which 
you read in the living light of the unerring repetition 
of the generations about you ; that the physical, the 
mental and the moral are but phases of the oue great 
vital force which we call life. 5 
Until a recent period scientists thought that heat, 
light and electricity were independent forces. lie 
who demonstrated that they were only different phases 
of one and the same great power, and gave to man the 
key of transposition, heralded a new age of progress, 
the foreshadowing of which is beyond present estimate. 
This day you are invested in the panoply of office 
which makes you the high priests of a trinity, the 
teaching of which has not been handed down through 
twenty centuries by a priesthood and subject to multi- 
ple error, but read in letters of living light in the life 
about you. May it be your mission to lay broad the 
foundations of right living, a properly-developed vital- 
ity in the race, making easy transposition of the same 
into mentality and morality, the spiritual efflorescence 
which stamps us as divine. 
As we approach a new era, very naturally we ask 
ourselves, What has been the fruitage of the past? 
and has the century just lapsing into history added to 
the store of the world’s wisdom which challenges a 
favorable comparison with earlier periods and upon 
which coming generations may look back with ap- 
proval ? 
The year to come will be set apart for the proper 
commemoration of the first great medical discovery 
which heralded the dawn of the present century ; the 
arrest by vaccination of that great plague, the small- 
pox, which for centuries had stalked unchecked through- 
out all lauds, leaving its unburied dead by the thou- 
sands, as the harvest of its destruction. Scarcely less 
fortunate were those who survived its withering touch, 
since the maimed, the helpless, and the blind were left 
in every hamlet, as life-long witnesses of the terrible 
scourge. To Edward Jenner belougs the immortal 
fame of having presented to mankind this boon, the 
value of which it is difficult even for us to estimate. 
When some one great event crowns the life of an 6 
individual, it is often remarked, that, but for this, he 
would have remained unknown, and that it was a lucky 
accident which made him famous. Thus some general, 
by chance in command of veteran cohorts, wins a 
battle, when the fate of a nation hangs trembling in 
the balance, and the laurels of immortality are 
entwined about the brow of a world’s hero. If it ever 
happens, it comes as the exception to prove the rule, 
that behind the opportunity lay the life-long preparation 
which fitted the seizure of the supreme moment, and 
under the guidance of such a training moulded the 
destiny of empires. 
Since the days of the Cassars, the world had never 
seen a military genius equal to that of the “ Little 
Corporal,” who, at this hundred-years’ period, had sud- 
denly sprung full-fledged into the arena of victorious 
battle; but a careful study of Napoleon’s character 
teaches that, young as he was, he had been schooled 
in a life-long training of adverse circumstances which 
had moulded his iron character, and had given him the 
power of concentration of all his splendid faculties 
upon the one problem of the hour. 
To every individual comes some time, the full testing 
of his powers, and then, if found wanting, he falls 
deservedly into the rear of the column in disgrace, and 
is rarely heard from again. In the phraseology of the 
Biblical writers, “ God calls us, and, if we hear not his 
voice, woe betide us.” Thus will come to you, my 
young friends, some day the voice; will you be ready 
to answer the summons ? The Roman philosopher 
said, “ Let the training of the youth be in that to which 
he is to devote himself in life-long pursuit.” 
Let us pause for a moment, and see if Edward 
Jenner was a fitting example of the preparation which 
crowns a life with deserving success. Born in 1749, 
the sou of a clergyman, with an elder brother of the 
same profession, young Jenner was carefully trained 7 
in the classics, but at an early age, showed a taste for 
natural history. In the method of the period, he 
served an apprenticeship to a surgeon near Bristol, 
and upon its completion in 1770 went to London, 
entered as a student at St. George’s Hospital, and had 
the singular good fortune to become the inmate of the 
family of the famous John Hunter. He soon became 
a favorite pupil. At this time, Mr. Hunter was forty- 
two. He was already a well-known teacher, had been 
a senior surgeon in the wars in Portugal; and in 1771 
there was placed at his disposal the collections in 
natural history which had been brought home by the 
famous circumnavigator, Captain Cook. 
Jenner was remarkable for the neatness and precision 
with which he made preparations of anatomy and 
natural history. His dissections of tender and delicate 
organs, his success in minute injections, and the taste 
which he displayed in their arrangement is said to have 
been almost unrivalled. He was solicited by Captain 
Cook to become the naturalist of his succeeding ex- 
pedition, the following year, but Jenner’s desire to 
settle in the place of his nativity was too strong to 
admit the acceptance of the appointment. He pre- 
ferred the seclusion of a country village, and to this 
selection do we owe his transcendent gift to mankind. 
John Hunter, from the first, was very proud of Jenner. 
He wished him to unite in establishing a school in 
London to teach natural history, human and compara- 
tive anatomy. Although declined, the instructions of 
his great master were not lost upon the young country 
surgeon. Jenner not only possessed the proper spirit 
of inquiry necessary to a student of nature, but he 
endeavored to excite it in others. He was instrumental 
in establishing two societies of professional men in his 
neighborhood, meeting for the common purpose of 
advancing their knowledge upon subjects connected 
with their pursuits and for better personal acquaintance. 8 
He was of a lively disposition, and distinguished for 
mirth, playfulness and wit. As a consequent, he was 
a general favorite. The following lines, addressed to 
a lady upon the recoverv of her daughter, and sent 
with a pair of ducks, afford a specimen of his humor : 
“ I’ve dispatched, my dear madam, this scrap of a letter, 
To say that Miss May is very much better; 
A regular doctor no longer she lacks, 
And therefore, I’ve sent her a couple of quacks.” 
Although separated, the master and pupil were kept 
in touch by a regular correspondence. From a letter 
of Mr. Hunter, I quote you these inquiries, since they 
give a glimpse of the thoughts of both: “See if you 
can catch the number of pulsations, and the frequency 
of breathing in the bat without torture. If the frost 
is hard, see what vegetables freeze ; bore holes in 
large trees and see whether the sap runs out, which 
will show it is not frozen.” 
Seeming trivial accidents often lead inquiring minds 
to most important conclusions. To the ordinary boy. 
the falling of the apple from the tree would have been 
accepted as a matter of course ; not so to Newton. 
The clatter of the lid of the boiling tea-kettle, as lifted 
by the escaping steam, formulated to the mind of 
Watts, the harnessing into service a power which 
revolutionized the motor forces of the world. 
While yet a pupil of Mr. Ludlow, a young country 
woman remarked, “I cannot take small-pox, for I 
have had the cow-pock.” This incident never escaped 
Jenner’s recollection. He describes the process of 
inoculation which at this time was considered, aud 
truly so, a very important discovery: “bleeding until 
the blood was thin ; purging until the body was wasted 
to a skeleton ; and starving on vegetable diet to keep 
it so.” The patience manifested by Jenner in the 
prosecution of his studies upon cow-pock, the scrutiny 
to which he subjected every appearance that presented 9 
itself, aud the fortitude with which he withstood every 
untoward circumstance, are entitled to all praise, and 
exhibit his capabilities for conducting original investi- 
gations. He divested the subject of its difficulties and 
obscurities, and gave to vague, inapplicable, useless 
rumor the certainty aud precision of scientific know- 
ledge. 
Jt would be interesting to know the influence and 
aid of his great master during this period; since at this 
very time Hunter, with a rare devotion, was pursuing 
his investigations upon the origin, course, and develop- 
ment of the great pock. 
Dr. Jenner’s first vaccination was on the fourteenth 
of May, 1796. Two years later he visited London for 
the purpose of demonstrating its value. Although he 
remained nearly three months, he was unable to induce 
a single professional friend to make the experiment, 
and returned to the country without having succeeded 
in prevailing upon a single individual to submit to 
inoculation of the virus. He pressed the subject so 
much with his professional brethren in the country 
that, at a medical club at Redborough, to which he 
belonged, he was threatened with expulsion if he per- 
sisted in harassing them with a proposition which they 
then conceived had no foundation but in popular and 
idle rumor, and which had become entirely distasteful 
to them. 
Mr. Cline, of St. Thomas’s Hospital, to whom some 
virus had been sent, clandestinely inserted it into the 
thigh of a patient suffering from hip disease with the 
thought of producing counter-irritation. The develop- 
ment of the vesicles interested him, and they were 
permitted to run their course without disturbance. 
Small-pox matter was after introduced in three places, 
but the slight inflammation soon subsided. The de- 
monstrations were repeated with much enthusiasm. 
Mr. Cline soon urged Dr. Jenner to settle in London, 10 
with the promise of an income of ten thousand pounds 
a year. I quote from his letter in reply : “ Shall I 
who, even in the morning of my days, sought the lowly 
and sequestered paths of life, the valley and not the 
mountain; shall I, now the evening is fast approach- 
ing, hold myself up as an object for fortune and for 
fame? Admitting that it is a certainty that I obtain 
both, what stock should I add to my little fund of 
happiness ? My fortune, with what flows in from my 
profession, is sufficient to gratify mv wishes; indeed, 
so limited is my ambitiou, and that of my nearest con- 
nections, that were I precluded from future practice, I 
should be enabled to obtain all I want. And, as for 
fame, what is it? A gilded butt, forever pierced by 
the arrows of malignancy. The name of John Hunter 
stamps this observation with the signature of truth.” 
It is very probable that this letter was written when 
smarting under the sting of ridicule and the sharpest 
criticism from the profession, from whom he had 
looked for support. 
Sooner or later the world, however, recoguizes the 
true value of its servants. Fortunately, I)r. Jenner 
lived long to enjoy his well-earned fame. Foreign 
societies and academies enrolled him in the list of 
honorary membership, and the home societies adorned 
their transactions with his name. Oxford granted him 
an honorary degree such as had not been conferred 
before in seventy years. Vaccination was instituted 
in the army and navy. Napoleon ordered the soldiers 
of the empire to be vaccinated ; and the practice soon 
extended through the civilized world. Large sums of 
money were sent him, subscribed in various countries, 
even the far off East. Parliament voted him special 
houors. The following incident is worthy of mention : 
Dr. Wickham, one of the travelling Fellows of the 
University of Oxford was imprisoned in France. Dr. 
Jenner addressed a petition to Napoleon for his libera- 11 
tion at the time when his animosity to England was 
at its height. It was presented when in his carriage, 
changing horses. “Away, away,” exclaimed the 
emperor. “But do you see, said Josephine, who was 
beside him, do you see from whom it comes, Jenner?” 
The tone of Napoleon’s voice was immediately 
softened ; “ What that man asks must not be refused.” 
And the petition was granted. 
Dr. Waterhouse, of Cambridge, who wrote his thesis 
in Latin and received his degree from the famous 
university at Leyden, introduced vaccination into 
America, an event spoken of to this day as reflecting 
honor upon this uuiversity city. Treasured to the last 
was the snuff-box sent by Dr. Jenner which contained 
the precious virus. 
In connection with this subject, should ever be 
coupled the name of the late Dr. Henry A. Martin, of 
Boston, who introduced into America and established 
the cultivation of bovine virus, who eradicated small- 
pox from the armies of the Union during the late war, 
and who, since Jenner, was probably the best authority 
upon the subject of vaccination. 
Cotemporaneous with Dr. Jenner and also a student 
of John Hunter, was England’s most famous surgeon 
of the generation, Sir Astley Cooper. During his 
career as a teacher, he had under instruction eight 
thousand pupils, moulded the surgical thought of two 
continents, and was the author of several works never 
surpassed in accuracy of description and in beauty of 
illustration. 
Scarpa, the celebrated Italian surgeon, now known 
to most of you only by the name of a triangle, was 
scarcely less famous, and was the originator of the im- 
portant branch of anatomical teaching so valuable to 
the practical surgeon — regional anatomy. 
My genial master, the poet and autocrat of modern 
New England literature, was a student of Baron 12 
Larrey, the great Surgeon-General of Napoleon, whose 
works upon military surgery may still be studied with 
profit. 
The achievements of the yet living masters are too 
recent to require enumeration — Pasteur whose early 
scientific investigations were the inspiration to the 
genius of Mr. Lister, which has revolutionized surgery ; 
Virchow, the man of letters, equally distinguished in 
statemanship as in science, who, as the President of 
the Berlin International Medical Congress, freely 
awarded to American surgeons present pre-eminence — 
histology, pathology, anatomy, bacteriology, surgery, 
re-written for your instruction by men yet active in 
mouldingand formulating new truths. 
What of America and her contributions to the 
science of medicine during the ceutury? Science is 
cosmopolitan. Wherever best taught, there her 
votaries flock to fill the open doors. Thus during the 
early part of this period, America’s best medical 
men were educated abroad. Upon a proper pedestal 
we have yet to place a memorial statue to Dr. Ben- 
jamin Rush, of Philadelphia — a statesman, signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, member of Congress, 
Surgeon-General of the Continental Army, founder of 
Dickinson College, President of the Society for the 
Abolition of Slavery, Treasurer of the United States 
Mint for fourteen years, promoter of public improve- 
ments. He was graduated at Princeton, studied 
medicine in Edinburgh, was a professor in the 
Philadelphia Medical College, and published many 
works which were long quoted as authority. 
Ephraim McDowell of Kentucky, rendered the world 
his debtor. He is often referred to as the obscure 
backwoods surgeon, who stumbled upon a new idea as 
by accident. It is just a ceutury since Dr. McDowell 
returned from Edinburgh, where he had been for two 
years a pupil of the famous John Bell. To the teach- 13 
ing of this great master, Dr. McDowell refers as the 
source of the conviction which, fourteen years later, 
found fruitage in the first successful ovariotomy. 
Nearly midway in the century did the discovery of 
ether and its practical application by Morton render 
to surgery the priceless boon of anesthesia. Within a 
few days have I seen two of the physicians who were 
present in the amphitheatre of the Massachusetts 
General Hospital, and witnessed the first surgical oper- 
ation ever performed under an anesthetic. 
It is almost invidious to repeat, even in your hear- 
ing, names selected from the many who have con- 
tributed to the knowledge of our art in America: 
Bigelow, father and son, of Boston, each equally 
famous in their respective subdivisions of labor; 
Bowditch, world-wide known as physician and phi- 
lanthropist; Warren, for three generations a famous 
name in the annals of surgery, the senior, John, 
student of Sir Astley Cooper, whose teachings served 
as inspiration to his latest day ; Muzzey, Crosby, 
Smith, Holmes, all New England names ; Sims, Flint, 
Gross, dead yet living; Sayre, Davis, Didama, living 
and active, around whose memories in early association 
we fondly linger, from whose teachings we derived 
inspiration and help, — these and a host of others, we 
gladly hold up to you as models of good citizens, wise 
teachers, thoughtful counsellors in sickness and in 
health, men who leave the world better for their living, 
immortal because having exerted influences for the 
moulding of higher life, which will continue to the end 
of time. 
Science takes no backward step. AH these co-related, 
kindred branches have developed in such a way that 
each is more difficult to teach, and each requires more 
time on the part of the pupil to master. The general 
preparation must also be of a much higher order to fit 
for the proper entrance upon the study of medicine. 14 
By general consensus of opinion, although there are 
many excellent physicians who have not had this 
preparatory training, the medical student of to-day 
should have had a college course of instruction or its 
equivalent. During the last generation the methods of 
teaching medicine have greatly changed. Earlier, as 
a supplement to the personal instruction which the 
student was supposed to receive by an apprenticeship 
to the physician selected, the winter courses of lectures 
were planned. These, together with a limited know- 
ledge derived from dissections, were repeated with 
slight variation ; and at the end of two courses, the 
student was usually supposed to be fitted for practice 
and was granted a diploma. There was no prescribed 
preparation, and the country school-boy was taught, 
side by side, with the college graduate. The lecture, 
filled with Latin technicalities, of necessity expressed 
in terms beyond the comprehension of the immature 
youth, was often equally unfitted to serve the better 
purpose of the collegiate. The criticism was apparent, 
but the remedy not patent. 
Your own college was among the very first to take 
the initiative and demand entrance examinations and 
graded courses of instruction. You also set the exam- 
ple of permitting final examination only after three 
years of thorough, careful, satisfactory pupilage. 
More recently the movement is developing to demand 
a four years’ course of graded instruction and to supply 
this, it is obligatory to have better teachers and more 
of them. This necessitates smaller classes, recitation 
instruction, quite as much as lectures and laboratories. 
These are veritable workshops, alike for master and 
apprentice. Anatomy, chemistry, physiology, pathol- 
ogy, bacteriology, materia medica — for all these 
branches of science, shop-room is required, and in 
extent quite beyond earlier needs. 
The medical college of to-day demands another build- 15 
ing, or series of buildings, than that of the former pat- 
tern. The amphitheatre as the lecture-room — cramped, 
crowded, stifled in the upper rows; to the last degree 
inconvenient of access; reached by garret-stairs, to 
descend to seats, as upon an illy-constructed ladder; a 
nightmare dream of our earlier years — should be 
relegated to the past. Bright, airy, well-lighted rooms 
are required, made pleasing and attractive, with good 
seats and tables, where the personal work may go on 
under the direction of well-trained assistants. 
The modern medical college should be so closely 
connected with the hospital that the clinical teachings 
may be made illustrative and profitable. Indeed, the 
hospital should be the workshop in the better sense, 
where the student becomes familiar with the “living 
pictures ” of our poor broken humanity, the recon- 
struction of which is to be his future life-long labor. 
Hospitals are important for the care, especially, of 
the poor, the home for the homeless. These, the 
public have long held in kindly interest and support. 
As a rule, the best physicians of the respective locali- 
ties have willingly rendered gratuitous service; but 
the medical college has been too often looked upon as 
a private affair, a doctor’s business venture, entered 
into for gain. Should it not, the rather, be considered 
by the public as a technical school of the highest 
order ? 
The general public has long felt it a wise invest- 
ment to furnish the very best opportunities for the 
education of ministers, teachers, engineers, architects, 
artists even. Should they not easily see that they 
have a vital personal interest in the proper fitting and 
training of that large body of physical engineers who 
are to have the oversight of their own persons, to 
care for and keep in order their own vital machines ? 
In large degree the physicians of Syracuse are 
graduates of the medical department of your own 16 
university Note the honor which they reflect upon 
the persistent, self-sacrificing efforts of your teachers 
in the years when the standards of medical learning 
were here first advanced with regard to the quality 
and attainment of the pupil, rather than to the num- 
bers to be graduated. 
The self-interest of the entire public, the rich by no 
means excepted, demands that the best possible advan- 
tages be given the student of medicine, to whom later 
is to be entrusted the life and welfare of the body 
politic. 
Let the general public, represented by your goodly 
city, show their approval of the work here so well 
inaugurated by a generous support given to the medi- 
cal department of your university. A new building 
should be erected at once, so commodious and so well 
equipped that it may not suffer in comparison with 
any in the great Empire State.2 
Within a few days I have examined with some care 
the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in regard to 
the advantages offered for the instruction of medical 
pupils. Here the usual process is reversed. The 
hospital predominates; but there are laboratories iu 
considerable number with facilities for the teaching of 
the science of medicine, while the art is in daily prac- 
tice iu its many splendid wards. The medical college 
proper is yet to be, but the thought tends directly in 
the line of small classes, personally trained by compe- 
tent teachers. These to be competent require special 
instruction iu the art of teaching, now more lacking in 
medicine than in any of the great departments of 
science. 
The really successful instructor is he who imparts 
of himself as well as his subject. This has been 
2 At the banquet following the graduation exercises, a subscrip- 
tion was opened. Funds have been received, and a new building to 
cost $100,000 is rapidly approaching completion. 17 
termed the “divine afflatus” of his calling; but it is 
really because such a master knows his subject, and 
this knowledge begets affection for it. He is “ eaten 
out ” by it. It becomes a part of himself, and it, as 
well as he, must talk. 
There is nothing difficult to understand about such 
divinity. It is in the boy, when he catches his first 
rabbit, visits for the first time the circus, and he must 
tell the whole household about the new experiences. 
Such love begets knowledge, and to the real student 
the border lines of the same widen from day to day. 
Nothing is so detrimental as a half-truth. Let the 
line be drawn as clearly as possible between ignorance 
and knowledge. 
There is an art in medicine as well as a science. 
Let me quote you in illustration from our inimitable 
Dr. Holmes—mourned by us all — who had the 
power of imparting even dry facts with the admixture 
of a wit which had the effervesence and flavor of 
champagne. 
“ You will remember, of course, always to get the 
weather gauge of your patient. I mean to place him 
so that the light falls on his face and not on yours. It 
is a kind of ocular duel which is about to take place 
between you; you are going to look through his 
features into his pulmonary, hepatic and other internal 
machinery; and he is going to look into yours quite 
as sharply to see what you think about his probabilities 
for time and eternity. No matter how hard he stares 
at your countenance, he should never be able to read 
his fate in it. It should be cheerful as long as there 
is hope, and serene in its gravity when there is nothing 
left but resignation. 
“The face of a physician, like that of a diplomatist, 
should be inpenetrable. Nature is a benevolent old 
hypocrite; she cheats the sick and dying with illusions 
better than any anodynes. 18 
“ If there are cogent reasons why a patient should 
be undeceived, do it deliberately and advisedly, but do 
not betray your apprehensions through your tell-tale 
features. We had a physician in our city whose smile 
was commonly reckoned as being worth five thousand 
dollars a year to him — in the days, too, of moderate 
incomes. You cannot put on such a smile as that, any 
more than you can get sunshine without sun; there 
was a tranquil and kindly nature under it that irradi- 
ated the pleasant face it made one happier to meet on 
his daily rounds. But you can cultivate the disposi- 
tion and it will work its way through to the surface. 
Nay, more — you can try to wear a quiet and encour- 
aging look, and it will react upon your disposition and 
make you like what you seem to be, or at least bring 
you nearer your own likeness.” 
Science has not alone shown the safe and sure way 
in which wounds tend toward recovery, but, as is 
usually the case, the really, in the end, easy path for 
the surgeon to pursue. Let the coming century find 
no practising surgeon who is not master of his surgical 
technique, as the high priest of a most sacred calling. 
Almost unconsciously we are led to think of modern 
surgical technique as an art rather than a science. 
Let us so accept it. Based upon scientific principles, 
the work should be artistic; a blundering surgeon 
may be aseptic, but this should never be au excuse for 
clumsiness. The true surgeon is skilful, which term 
means so much, full of that skill which makes his work 
really automatically correct; like the master of a musi- 
cal instrument, who through it pours forth the en- 
raptured strains of soul-inspiring, moving power, with 
never the thought of hand or bow or string. 
Anesthesia and asepsis have brought into surgery a 
small army of men who lack the training which, half a 
century ago, was considered absolutely essential to 
success. Then to be a surgeon meant au apprentice- 19 
ship. Should it be less at the present time? The 
greatest danger to-day lies in the willing, enthusiastic, 
but half-trained recruits with whom our ranks are 
overcrowded. Here as elsewhere comes the law of the 
survival of the fittest, but at what fearful cost of life, 
matched, almost overshadowed, by the self-condemna- 
tion which permits of no condonement! 
The recent Address on Surgery before the British 
Medical Association, by Mr. J. Grieg Smith, “ The 
Art of the Surgeon,” should be read by every student, 
by every surgeon. 
“ That the art of surgery is teachable there can be 
no dispute; that it is worth teaching is still less dis- 
putable. Why, then, is it not taught? The art can 
be taught only in one way, the way of teaching all the 
plastic arts. 
“ The young artist must, while beginning the prac- 
tice of his art, have a master at his elbow, a master 
who will guide him in the use of his hand, his eye, and 
his instruments ; who will in the fullest sense make 
him his pupil, and personally lead him on, step by 
step, toward such excellence in the art as he himself 
has attained. . . . 
“We might ask to be put on the level with the fine 
arts, and seek for a Royal Academy of Surgery, as we 
have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture and 
Music. To such an academy a school of teachers 
should be attached. The school would be a surgical 
hospital, with every known excellence of hygiene and 
nursing and appliance. The teachers would be those 
who are superior in our art, the pupils men who are 
already qualified, who seek for practice in the higher 
walks of surgery. Then let us work for it.” 
A great art is not builded in a day. We profit from 
the experience of our predecessors. The coming 
centuries will have much to criticise in the review of 
our labors. Let them also find themselves indebted to 20 
us for much experience of real value in both the 
science and the art of surgery. 
The venerable oath of the great Father of Medicine 
which you repeat to-day, binds you, as in ancient 
times, to visit the sick man for the sole purpose of do- 
ing him good, and to so conduct yourself as to avoid 
the appearance of evil. This same bond makes us 
brethren in a common cause. The teachings of our 
science, which you are called upon to disseminate are 
already of such mighty import that, if they were 
universally adopted, they would divide the sufferings 
of mankind, increase the longevity of the race one- 
third, and double its productive power. 
Jn the evolution of medicine and sanitary science 
lie, in large measure, the happiness and destinies of 
the ages to come. In the everchauging kaleidoscopic 
pattern, the individual factors of man’s personality 
should intertwine and blend, as the colors, at the hand 
of a great artist, in perfect harmonic symmetry and 
relationship. 
Contribute your part to the better development of 
the mental, the moral, and the physical nature of man ; 
the great tripod upon which must ever rest the 
advancement of the race; and in the harmonic action 
of these great forces there must evolve the already 
heralded progress of the twentieth century.