THE 
POSSIBILITIES OF MEDICINE. 
AN ADDRESS, 
B¥ 
T. GAILLARD THOMAS, M.D. THE 
POSSIBILITIES OF MEDICINE. 
AN ADDRESS 
DELIVERED BEFORE THE GRADUATING CLASS OF THE 
LONG ISLAND COLLEGE HCWLTAI;*OE iMjJ 
BY 
T. GAILLARD THOMAS, M. D. 
(reprinted from the n. y. medical record.) 
NEWYORK; 
John J. O’Brien & Son, Steam Book and Job Printers, 397 Fourth Avenue. 
1891. THE POSSIBILITIES OF MEDICINE, 
T. GAILLARD THOMAS, M. D., 
NEWYORK. 
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class : 
Colleagues of a half hour’s birth, who now for the 
first time open your infant eyes upon the future which is 
to be at once the arena of your efforts and the criterion of 
your success, in the name of the faculty of the distinguished 
institution, of which to-night I am the mouthpiece, welcome, 
a warm and cordial welcome to the Tanks of medicine ! 
The great Alexander Hamilton, who fell before the 
deadly pistol of Aaron Burr, was said by an eloquent 
contemporary to have “bowed before the force of an im- 
perious custom.” Like him I stand before’you to night, in 
obedience to an unwritten law which calls for an address 
at a medical graduation, on the part of one who, it is 
assumed, is able to speak to the young graduate words of 
advice, encouragement, and warning. May the wisdom of 
your teachers not be impugned by their choice of Mentor, 
and may I be inspired to say something which may in the 
distant future, as you ply your trying calling, come back 
to your memories with sustaining power, with pleasant 
recollection, and with inspiriting influence ! 
The noble and exalted character of the ancient 
profession which in this hour enrols your names among its 
votaries has too often been set forth by writers and speakers 
to need allusion on my part to-night. The devotion which 
it calls forth from you, the singleness of purpose, the purity 4 
of life—all these have been over and over again recited to 
audiences Just such as that which now graces this hall, by 
more ornate pens and by more eloquent lips than mine. 
Elsewhere, then, must I seek my theme if I hope to engage 
your attention or excite your interest; and in this hope I 
select from the large held of exhausted topics “The Possi- 
bilities of Medicine.” 
Has it ever struck you as a remarkable fact that many 
professions fill their ranks, even in this utilitarian day, in 
consequence of the romance, the dangers, the chances of 
glory, the opportunities for heroism, the lustre, and the 
renown which are possibilities in them; in spite of manifold 
dangers, hardships, and self-sacrifices to which they expose 
their followers ? At this very hour, while our statesmen 
bemoan the neglected farms of Vermont, New Hampshire, 
and Massachusetts, located as they are in regions remark- 
able for beauty and salubrity, men prefer to the quiet lives 
which their cultivation would cause them to lead, the hard 
and dangerous profession of the sailor, than which no life 
could entail more of suffering and of trial. Did our country 
need volunteers to-morrow, there would be no lack of men. 
who would, for a mere pittance, expose themselves in the 
ranks of her armies; and the fisheries of all countries are 
richly supplied by youths whose lives are constantly 
sacrificed in this hazardous pursuit of a precarious living. 
The human mind craves just such excitement as is afforded 
by a journey into Darkest Africa, or by a voyage to the 
icy north in search of an open Polar Sea. 
The magnificent rewards which await the painter; the 
immortal fame which lies fallow for appropriation by the 
successful sculptor; the glorious future which is open to the 
great architect, are enough to give charms to the wretched 
attic and solace to the impoverished board of the hard- 
laboring aspirant. How many a gallant youth in this hall 
would yield up his life willingly to live in history with the 
fame of Sheridan ? How ardently would not another strive 
through a lifetime of labor and of waiting to lay his country 5 
under the debt which it owes to Farragut ? And what effort 
would be too great to secure to another the evergreen crown 
which adorns the memory of Longfellow ? Arms, literature, 
art, law, divinity, all have bright and glorious rewards for 
those who have the courage to aspire to them, the patience 
to suffer for them, the industry to work for them, the genius 
to obtain them. 
Think you that the science of medicine, founded four 
hundred years before the birth of Christ, the chosen work 
of our Saviour himself, the most far-reaching and benign of 
all modern pursuits, stands alone in its inability to reward 
its votaries ? Far from it! Look back with me into history, 
and I shall not be called upon to take you into the field of 
of ancient history even; and it will go hard but I shall 
make you agree with me that of all callings, all pursuits, 
all professions, the rewards of medicine are greater, more 
lofty, more desirable, and more enduring than those of any 
other in existence. 
Before proceeding further with our argument, let us 
agree as to what we will mutually fix upon as the highest 
and most desirable of earthly rewards. Had this question 
been put to Buddha, that highly civilized Hindoo would 
probably have replied, “To be considered a god among 
men;” Confucius and Mahommed would probably have said, 
“ To be the founder of a religion to which millions would 
bow;” Caesar and Charlemagne, “To rule the world;” 
Washington and Franklin, “To have set up a form of 
government to be the prototype of the nations for ages to 
come;” Napoleon 1., “To be considered the greatest0 
soldier and statesman that the planet has ever known, even 
though the attainment of the end should involve wading 
up to the armpits through blood.” You and I, representing 
as we do the two great moral centres of the universe—New 
York and Brooklyn—will agree that he who has done the 
greatest good for his fellow man, has, in the doing of it, 
won the greatest reward in Earth’s possession, even though 
no mortal man know of the deed but him ! As you and I look upon the great picture by Yibertr 
entitled “The Missionary’s Story,” we see the crown of 
glory, the diadem of success, not upon the head of the 
honored and decorated abbot, but upon that of the ragged 
servant of the cross, with his body deformed by torture 
and his frame wrecked by toil. 
The forces of civilization work hand in hand for the 
common good. Since the lifting of the veil which, under 
the name of the Dark Ages, shut out the benign light of 
law, of progress, of the tine arts, and of religion, how nobly 
has each of its servitors striven for the re-establishment of 
all that was good and elevating among men ! It was as if 
all forces had combined to woo back the smile of God upon 
the earth ! Let us see what the medical art has contributed 
as its quota of work for the good of society. 
Where are now those dreadful epidemics of the plague 
described by Thucydides, Procopius, and later by Defoe, 
which desolated Athens, Florence, and London; and, in 
the reign of Justinian, are said to have lasted for thirty 
years, and to have destroyed, according to an estimate 
regarded as reasonable by Gibbon, nearly one hundred 
million lives ? G-one from the notice of the world, and 
although, even as late as 1835, showing its horrent front 
in Alexandria, blocked out from civilized Europe, and re- 
duced absolutely to insignificance by our agent, Hygiene ! 
Where now is the fiend of cholera, represented by 
painters and by poets as a fell hag, who, with pallid cheeks 
and lurid eye, marched, torch in hand, into the hearts of 
the great seaports of the world, sowing death and sorrow 
broadcast in her path ? Almost a thing of the past ! 
Limited, controlled, and almost wholly imprisoned in that 
fateful eastern land of Asia, where the demon of disease 
seems to fight his last fight for existence! 
Where is now that yellow “ scourge of God,” which, 
only two decades ago, made its home in the lovely city 
which looks out upon the delta of the Mississippi; made 
occasional excursions to Mobile, Pensacola, Savannah, and 7 
Charleston; at times tramped, up the borders of the great 
river and laid Memphis in sorrow ; and, in the beginning 
of this century even, reached New York and caused its 
authorities to fence off a portion of the town and call it 
the infected district ? Seized by the throat by our servant, 
Quarantine, and told in no uncertain terms, “ Thus far 
shaft thou go, and no further ! ” 
Where is to-day that loathsome destroyer of life and of 
beauty, small-pox, which a century ago decimated nations, 
entering households and admitting of no escape, doomed 
the loveliest to death or disfigurement; and scarce more 
than a century ago, with unbridled insolence marching 
into the halls of Versailles, laid her polluted hands upon 
the monarch on his throne and dragged him down to 
ignominious and revolting death ? Lashed to heel by our 
agent, Vaccination, and, like whimpering hound, held 
securely in leash. 
What has become of typhus, jail, ship, or spotted 
fever, which doubled the horrors of the horrible sea voyage, 
and made room in jails and prisons for others to replace 
those whom it sent to Potter’s Field? Swept out of 
existence as thoroughly and as surely as are to-day the 
three great moral blots upon the fair escutcheon of 
civilization; slavery, duelling, and poligamy. 
But I must cease my enumeration, though it is difficult 
for one who loves his calling and glories in its conquests to 
do so. One more illustration, one which will come closer 
to the heart of every man among you who loves woman, and 
surely he who does not is none, and I leave this part of my 
subject. A few, a very few years ago, the graveyards of 
all lands, from the most savage to the most civilized, were 
filled with the bodies of women gone to their last account 
in the most interesting period of their existence. The 
very name of puerperal or childbed fever brought the 
shadow of fear to the face of the bravest man, and through 
its baleful influence scarcely a hearthside in our land but 
had a place which stood vacant. To-day, thanks to the 8 
greatest of medical agencies, Antisepsis, even in the large 
lying-in-hospitals of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. 
Petersburg, and New York, the disease is almost unknown ! 
Where, even as late as ten years ago, fifty were lost, less 
than one life is lost now ! 
So wonderful, so startling, so extraordinary are these 
results that I almost admit to my mind the fear that the 
non-medical portion of my hearers may suspect me of 
boasting as I read the record of the proud achievements 
of medicine during the last hundred years. I have but to 
appeal for support to the large medical contingent of my 
audience, and they will bear out the assertion that my 
claims are even less exacting than they might with Justice 
have been. 
You may contend that the very extent of this enumera- 
tion of the conquests of medicine proves that the possibility 
of achievements in the future must, of necessity, be greatly 
curtailed. This is far from true. There is an old French 
adage which declares, “Plus on s’eleve, plus I’horizon 
s’avance;” “The higher one climbs, the more extended 
becomes the scope of vision.” One great initial discovery 
often elevates the students of a science to heights not 
dreamed of before, from the elevation of which limitless 
space unfolds itself to view. Think of the secondary 
discoveries rendered possible by the initial discovery of 
the microscope, of the telescope, of the Copernican system, 
of the circulation of the blood, of steam, and of electricity. 
When the grand fact was recently established that 
diseases were transmitted from individual to individual by 
organisms, which have been styled “bacilli;” that by the 
growth of these organisms diseases were perpetuated upon 
the earth; and that by their destruction the affections to 
which they give rise may be prevented, one of the greatest 
discoveries of any age was made; one of the most sudden 
elevations of investigators, with resulting expansion of 
view, was accomplished that the world has ever known. 
By it you stand to-night upon a plane far more elevated 9 
than that which even the ydungest of your teachers 
occupied upon his graduation. Your possibilities in 
medicine are proportionately greater than his were; be it 
your function to profit by your good fortune ! 
It requires no prophet’s power to foretell the fact that 
the science of medicine, which up to the beginning of the 
seventeenth century stumbled, footsore and weary, along 
its tedious way, with little enterprise or progress; which in 
the next hundred years began to show decided evidences 
of awakening power; and which during the nineteenth 
century has made great and signal strides along the 
avenue of improvement, stands at this hour upon the 
threshold of an era which will belittle all the past, and 
accomplish in one decade of the future more than a century 
has previously brought forth. I make no reference now to 
work actually performed by Pasteur and by Koch. I 
allude only to the principle which underlies the labors of 
these great men; to the initial discovery which has 
rendered their secondary discoveries possible. The so- 
called discoveries of Pasteur and Koch may in the future 
rank with the fascinating tales of the “Arabian Nights.” 
It matters not if they do; the great ball of knowledge and 
of truth has been set in motion, and all the powers of earth, 
if arrayed against it, could not check it in its irresistable 
progress. 
I have received so many kindnesses from my confreres 
in Brooklyn, and I have so many loyal friends and true in 
this good city, that I feel to-night as if I were talking to a 
set of people to whom I could speak confidentially, as if in 
my circle of intimates, and say what by the world at large 
might be viewed with critical eyes. Feeling so, let me 
venture to tell you this: Were I offered to-day by some 
great power the accomplishment of one wish, I think that 
I would select the destruction of the process by which 
alcohol is created. I know full well that the most cruel, 
the most treacherous, and the most vindictive of all the 
races of the earth are the most temperate; for example, 10 
the Hindoos, the Turks, the Arabs, and the most brutal of 
all savages, the implacable North American Indian. But, 
putting advantages and disadvantages into mental scales, 
I should select as the wish nestling closest to my heart, 
the abolition of alcohol. If this were denied me I would 
choose the power of stamping out forever those contagious 
diseases which till our graves with curly heads and 
dimpled cheeks, and our homes with sorrow that knows 
no comforting. I would destroy those terrors of the 
household, scarlatina, diptheria, and the host of con- 
tagious maladies which go hand in hand with them. The 
tirst of these wishes is impossible of attainment. But what 
of the second ? Gentlemen, the way to its accomplishment 
is open to every man with willing hand, determined mind, 
and intelligent brain who stands before me now. Surely 
it is not too sanguine a prediction that the next century 
may see the extinction of contagious diseases. 
I have told you how much the science of medicine has 
done for the prevention of disease. Listen now while I 
point out to you how much remains for you and your 
contemporaries to accomplish. 
Although by no means proven, it appears probable, 
that in the animal system there are elements which 
furnish food for certain organisms, styled bacilli, which, 
being attacked by these, help them to flourish so luxuri- 
antly that their multiplication excites a tremendous 
reaction in the economy, which often ends in death; and 
that these elements once being destroyed, do not often 
reproduce themselves, and the recurrence of a successful 
invasion by that particular variety of bacillus is not again 
possible. How else can we account for the immunity 
secured against second attacks from the occurrence of 
one invasion by small-pox, varicella, whooping-cough, 
scarlatina, measles, and other contagious diseases ? It 
was probably in this way that the prevention of small-pox 
by vaccination was accomplished. 11 
Jenner, finding out that a disease of the cow, called 
vaccinia, used np in the system of milk-maids the food 
upon which the germ of small-pox lived; and believing 
in the old doctrine, “in time of peace, prepare for war,” 
systematically laid waste the country before any future 
small pox raid could start out upon its course, and rendered 
invasion impossible. 
This appears to be a philosophical and satisfactory 
explanation of the method of protection accomplished by 
vaccination, and one would have expected that ere this a 
a law would have been established with regard to the 
matter, and other similar discoveries made. Vaccination 
was discovered in 1799; since that time not one other 
contagious disease, unless the claims of Pasteur and of 
Koch should prove valid, has been prevented by the 
development of this brilliant idea! What a wonderfully 
rich and fascinating field of labor here opens up before the 
ambitions aspirant, and how promising its future appears! 
But this is not the only way in which diseases have 
been checked. In certain maladies the pabulum of disease 
germs, while not destroyed beyond the power of reproduc- 
tion by one attack of a disorder, appears to be to a great 
extent damaged in quantity and quality by certain drugs. 
Thus we see the salts of mercury greatly limiting the 
development of “lues venerea,” and the bark of the 
cinchona tree to a certain extent controlling that curse of 
our country, malaria. And yet, strange as it may appear 
to you, of the so-called specifics in medicine these two 
stand entirely alone. I challenge the mention of any 
others. 
Here again I direct your eager eyes up an avenue 
leading to fame and usefulness, scarcely less promising 
than the one previously mentioned; an avenue in which 
industry and genius have full scope for exercise, and one 
filled with rewards which must satisfy any truly noble 
ambition. 12 
But you will say this very paucity of result proves the 
difficulty of the work; it is easy for a speaker to point out 
the way and to say “go thou and follow it;” how are we 
to solve a problem which has already proved so difficult of 
solution? Your elevation is greater than that of your 
predecessors; the scope of your vision is much more 
extended. Tenner’s discovery was the result of empirical 
observation; the discoveries of Koch are guided by the 
pure and certain light of science. You stand not where 
Tenner stood, but where Koch stands. 
If it be true, and there is no reason why it should not 
be so, that by previous destruction of pabulum in the 
blood, either by the action of drugs or of ptomaines, or 
by the discovery of phagocytes, or opposing bacilli, the 
invasion or successful advance of the germ-elements which 
create contagious and infectious diseases can be controlled, 
a field of labor will be opened to the physician which will 
make of medicine the most fascinating of callings. 
The future is pregnant with promise. Young aspirant 
for the glory, the greatness, and the honors of that future 
which like a smiling landscape spreads out before you 
to-night, “ I tell you that many prophets and kings have 
desired to see those things which ye see, and have not 
seen them ; and to hear those things which ye hear, and 
have not heard them.” 
Gird up your loins, then, and enter the arena with 
determined purpose and honest ambition. In the words 
of Virgil, “ Hie labor, hoc opus est;” the way to the solu- 
tion of the problem must be found by your industry, your 
ingenuity, and your perseverance; in other words, by 
those qualities the combination of which is called genius. 
Did you ever hear of the solution by Darwin of the 
question as to the reason why clover grows so much more 
luxuriantly around human habitations than in places at a 
distance from them ? Let me relate it to you as a good 
example of the method in which, by careful observation, 
by patient research, and by persevering labor, secrets hidden in the arcana of nature may be laid bare; as an 
illustration of the fact that truths in science are not 
stumbled upon hap-hazard, but are arrived at by working 
“line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and 
there a little until the moment of fruition comes, and 
the investigator is rewarded by success. Such successes 
are called efforts of genius. But what is genius ? The 
power of prolonged, undeviating ffxation of thought; an 
absorbing mental devotion to the development of an idea ; 
a “ prolonged attention,” as Sir William Hamilton tersely 
expresses it. Men phenomenally capable of such mental 
efforts live once in a century, not oftener. Socrates, 
Newton, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Darwin, mark the 
lapse of centuries in time as mile-stones mark the lapse of 
space. Oh, that Darwin had been a physician, and that 
he had stood on the night of his graduation just where 
you stand to-night! Oh, that among the gallant cohort 
of faithful men who face me now, more than one Darwin 
may be returning my glance! 
But this is a digression. Let me return to the story of 
the clover. Clover is fructified by the transportation of 
pollen from male to female plants upon the legs of bees. 
Its petals are stiff, and thus the common bee is too light 
in weight to bend them apart and carry the pollen far 
enough down to accomplish the fructification of the plant. 
The heavy humble-bee only is capable of doing this. Now, 
the humble-bee lays its eggs just below the surface of the 
green sward, and here the field mouse devours them. 
Where cats exist field mice are kept from becoming- 
numerous, the eggs are preserved, and thus it is that 
clover flourishes where man has his habitation and his 
companion the cat is present. 
By just such reasoning has Metchnikoff, the bacteriolo- 
gist, worked out his problems. Take, for example, his 
demonstration of the fact that the leucocytes of the green 
frog acted as phagocytes, or devourers, upon the bacilli of 14 
anthrax, to which that reptilian is invulnerable in a tem- 
perature less than 68° F. Filling a small sack made of the 
pith of a reed with anthrax bacilli, he put this under the 
skin of a green frog and sewed up the cutaneous incision. 
In a few days the lymph of the frog passing through the 
walls of and into the sack without leucocytes, the bacilli 
grew rapidly. Under the skin of the same frog, he at the 
same time inserted a piece of the spleen of an animal 
which had just died of anthrax. This he left unprotected 
by a sack. The leucocytes of the frog devoured the bacilli, 
and not one lived to perpetuate the disease. They acted 
as phagocytes, and Metchnikoff, by this simple and very 
ingenious experiment, proved that it was in this way that 
the frog was rendered invulnerable to this disease. At no 
distant period we shall probably see Metchnikotf cultivating 
thousands of the leucocytes of the green frog, inoculating 
with them other animals suffering from anthrax, and thus 
opposing one bacterial army by another, as Pasteur has 
already done. 
Gentlemen of the graduating class, I have lauded to you 
the possibilities and the rewards of medicine; I have 
defined for you my conception of earthly reward; let me 
now test your sympathy with my views by putting to each 
of yon in sober earnest this question; Which would you 
prefer to be—not during the insignificant period of two or 
three decades called your lifetime, but in that posthumous 
time which is called history—the soldier who, even in 
defence of his country and her supposed rights, has won 
victories, filling households with sorrow, and inflicting the 
horrors of war upon a nation ; or the man who has blotted 
out from the list of diseases that terror of the nursery, 
scarlet fever, which has in the past created, and is now 
creating, such havoc in our households ? 
Would you prefer to be the creator of that wonder of 
art, the Angelus, which for ages will continue to give real 
pleasure to thousands of people, or the man who for all 
time takes from his fellow travellers along the painful 15 
pathway of life, the terrible scourge called diptheria? 
Would you prefer to receive the well-deserved rewards 
which have fallen to the greatest captain of our time, Yon 
Moltke; or those which await Koch, if the cure of tuber- 
culosis becomes jnacticable through his efforts ? 
The motto of the Yew York Academy of Medicine, coming 
down from mythological times, is this: Hommines deos 
accedunt, hommibus dando salutem.” “ Men most nearly 
resemble the gods, when they afford health to their fellow- 
men.55 If, as now seems highly propable, Robert Koch 
should succeed in curing and preventing tubercular disease 
in its various manifestations, what greater reward could 
he possibly ask for than the pleasure which he must feel 
when the reflection to which this motto gives rise comes to 
his mind? The reward of the ifliysician whose happy 
discovery stamps out a disease which before his day slew 
its thousands, comes from the hand of no emperor; his 
glory from the appreciation of no applauding multitude; 
his renown from the pen of no fulsome historian. For him 
the victor5 s crown comes from the hand of the immortal 
God; his glory from the satisfaction of doing a great and 
glorious work; his renown from the gratitude of his fellow- 
men ! The ‘‘ great wakening light,5 5 which blessed the eyes 
of Abou Ben Adhem ; not the imperial purple which decked 
the shoulders of the mighty Julius, constitutes his diadem 
and causes a halo to shine around his head. 
In the golden days of chivalry, when a young knight was 
to receive the accolade and become the defender of the 
weak and the redressor of wrong, he was required to spend 
an entire night in a cathedral, or other solemn place, reflect- 
ing upon the purity, the beneficence, and the grandeur of 
his new office, and in forming the noble resolve to make it 
no trade, but to administer his duties with the love of man 
in his heart, and the glory of God in his soul. Let this 
night and these exercises bear to you the relation of that 
vigil night of old ! 16 
Medicine is the noblest of professions ; the meanest of 
trades. Unless you can live lives of purity, of virtue, of 
honor, and of honesty, seek a livelihood elsewhere, and 
insult not the gods by striving through base methods and 
ignoble ambitions to resemble them ! 
Will you not now fully agree with me when, in 
closing this address, I ask you whether the j)ossibilities of 
medicine are not really greater than those of her sister 
sciences and arts? Will you not accord in my postulate 
that arms, arts, literature, science, all have their rewards, 
but that not one of them surpasses in the magnificence of 
its gifts those of which the god-like science, Medicine, is 
capable. 
When, a quarter of a century hence, I meet with one 
of you, as we both wend our ways along the highway of 
life, my locks as white as the driven snow, and yours as 
white as mine are now; come up to me, report yourself 
as a member of the graduating class of the Long Island 
College Hospital of 1891, and tell me which one of the 
beneficent discoveries, which the next twenty-five years 
are sure to bring forth, has been the means of causing you 
to resemble the gods and enrolled your name “ among the 
few, the immortal names that were not born to die;” and 
I, recalling at once to mind you and this pleasant evening, 
which has made us acquaint, will bid you God speed, even 
as I do to-night.