ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT

W. H. WARD, M. D., Phoenix.

Gentlemen of the Territorial Medical Association:

By a constitutional provision of our association, it becomes the duty of your presiding officer at the close of his term of service, to deliver an address.

This duty is imperative; were it not so, I would shrink from its performance, since there is perhaps no subject to which I can direct your attention that has not been investigated by each member of the association more fully than myself. You will, however, permit me briefly to refer to the present state of the medical profession, the duties and obligations of its members, and the special objects for which we are associated together.

You are well aware that the medical profession does not at present occupy the commanding position in the public estimation that it once did. We are apt to attribute this fact to the horde of quacks and irregular practitioners of all tribes and denominations that within a few years has overrun the country.

But why have these empirics obtained the position they hold? Is not this to a large degree the fault of those who claim to be of the regular profession?

They have received into their fellowship and admitted to their ranks-and to the honors and the emoluments of the profession, if not to its duties-men whose preliminary education, and whose opportunities to obtain a scientific medical education were totally inadequate to the demands of a profession on the proper practice of which the issues of life and death frequently depend.

The consequence has been that the public, discovering no great difference, either in the success, the scholarship or the deportment of the two classes, has lost confidence in the regular profession, though still retaining enough faith

in medical treatment to drive them to the boasting quacks who promise with assurance the cure of their maladies.

In view of such reason for regret, let us review a little the history of medicine; refresh our memory of its noble achievements; revive our pride in our vocation, and renew our loyalty to all the high ideals toward which we have striven in the past.

Nothing will more fitly accomplish all these objects than to look back over all the dim centuries that intervene to the time of Hippocrates, who first embodied in the famous oath that bears his name, the ethics of medicine. So matured a professional sentiment as is embodied in the Hippocratic oath could hardly have sprung from one man, unapproachably great as he may have been. Rather must it be the flowering into expression of all that was noble in ethics or humane in conduct among those who had practiced the healing art up to that time. Not to its antiquity alone do we render homage. Little less than marvelous is it that the art of medicine as now practiced, and the character of the ideal physician as we now understand it, really dates from the time of Hippocrates.

No physician can study the writings of this master, or consider his achievements, without being deeply stirred to put into the title he has so long held-"Father of Medicine" —unstinted measure of admiration and reverence. The influence of this one man has been beyond estimate. No other writer on medicine has approached him. Until nearly 1700 A. D.—a period of over 2,000 years-the works of Hippocrates were the main text books in all the medical colleges of the world. At Oxford, England, the only other writer whose works were considered worthy of serious study was Galen-himself a discipline of Hippocrates. Just at the present time, in the impetus that has been given medical thought, we forget how much we owe to the originator of the "Clinical Method"-even the word is his; to the author of the system of carefully kept records and observations of cases, and to the originator of accurate methods of physical diagnosis. We still speak of "Hippocratic