portance its physical namesake. But truth is mighty and will prevail. Medicine is stronger and better each year because of its steady search for truth to add to truth, and because of the altruism of its basic principles. Failure to comprehend and appreciate the fundamental barbarism of our modern structure makes it difficult for the physician to understand the attitude of a portion of the people towards him and his work. He points to the unselfish labor, the selfsacrificing devotion of seekers after medical truth; he glories in the altruism of a body of men whose first thought is to prevent disease, men who seek to find and point out the way of health to those who are often too blind to follow it. How long, he asks, must the physician preach the doctrine and the law of health to unheeding ears? When will the mothers and fathers of the land unite to banish the destroyers of their children? Why are the ignorant and unskilled, the charlatans and faddists, unable to command support and obstruct the making and administration of beneficent laws? He finds no answer, yet he may be of good cheer; the day is near at hand when the passage of good sanitary laws and their enforcement with rigid hand, will put an end to the needless epidemics of typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and its fellows, as it has already wellnigh banished small pox from well vaccinated countries. The day will come when no public officials shall dare to give their people diluted sewage for drink, and when every judge will fine or imprison the man or woman who carries death from house to house. A hundred years from now tuberculosis will be as rare as leprosy, and such innocent children and brilliant men and women as now die miserably and prematurely shall live in health. The bonds uniting our profession to the people will be knit close and even closer, if we keep our own house in order, and strive in the future as in the past to keep medicine a profession and not make of it a trade. Pursued in the spirit of philanthropy and scientific endeavor, its repulsive features serve but to bring out in clearer and higher relief its ennobling virtues. Trade is honorable, but the medical tradesman is degraded indeed. The scavenger's is a better and cleaner office than that of the physician who forgets the fundamental precepts of his guild. He who patents means of cure, or the commercialist who buys and sells his patients, is a living source of danger to the profession. To the practical, cool-headed, scientific attitude of the seeker after truth must be added the higher ideals that have drawn to our body in the past the best of the brain and heart of an intelligent people. Not only must we seek to make better doctors by abolishing the low-grade schools and raising the standard of graduation throughout the land, but we should help and encourage the fit amongst our youth to adopt our profession, and discourage the unfit. We must encourage and support our medical societies to the end that one great body shall move obedient to the will of its democracy, preach the truths of medical science, uphold its rights, end enforce its beneficent laws. As before stated, we look to the American Medical Association to improve the public health, to disseminate knowledge, to promote fraternity, and to punish the skulker and grafter. The power for good that can be exercised by this body is beyond expression, and it becomes the duty of every physician in good standing to enroll himself in its ranks. PURITY OF PROFESSIONAL MOTIVES AND CONDUCT We may thank God that the curse of sectarianism is removed from medicine, that there is no longer a "school," new or old, and that no sectarian body can long exist in the fierce light of modern medicine. Such belonged to the time and dark realm of the theory; we live in the full sunlight of proven truth. Division into warring schools checked ad vance, and prevented progress. It is good to know that any man who is earnest, honorable, and properly educated becomes our confrere, and that the "pathies" have fallen flat from very lack of opposition. The modern physician seeks truth to add to accumulated truths. The faddist with his one idea, his inflated pretensions, his perilous narrowness, presents perhaps his one grain of gold in his mass of baser metal. This one elementary grain of truth the physician stands ready to take, develop, and use; and its dogmatic possessor is despoiled for the public good. In the old days of almost pure theory the faddist had his opportunity. In our day he is an anachronism. The symptoms of disease, sound anatomy, and pathology leave little ground for strife as to methods of treatment. We should welcome truth even though buried deep in the mould of error, but we should set our faces and our hands against ignorance, dishonesty, and quackery, in or out of our profession. Above everything we should condemn and punish the commercialist in medicine, and cherish and maintain the humanitarian ideals which have ennobled and dignified our past, and will ensure for all time a place for medicine second to no other calling. DR. FRANKLIN STAPLES A few months ago there passed from this world to a better, from daily suffering to perfect peace, a man who in himself exemplified all that is best in our profession. Dr. Franklin Staples was loved by all who knew him. In his public relation he worked without thought of himself for the good of his kind. His interest in this society did not cease when he retired from the presidency he so worthily filled, in 1871, for even when he was too ill to attend our meetings he added his valuable contributions to our programs. His interest in medical education is only partially shown by the fact that he once filled the chair of medicine of the State University and was one of those foremost in the movement for a higher standard as prerequisite to state licensure. Up to the day of his death he worthily held the presidency of our State Board of Health, and up to the very last days of his life neither pain nor fatigue prevented him from filling the office in fact, and not merely in name. Though his body was crippled by incurable and advancing disease, his mind never lost hold upon things medi cal. Article after article of interest and value came to us from the hands of this courageous man, who faced the inevitable with a Spartan courage and fortitude tempered by a natural sweetness and humanity that suffering seemed only to strengthen. On one of the too rare occasions when I visited him at his home, he was surrounded by visitors, his "boys and girls" as he put it. Mothers and fathers themselves, but brought into the world under his ministrations. They and their mothers loved and respected this kindly, fearless uncomplaining, pain-racked man, and the latter days of his useful life were filled with the knowledge that their gratitude, sympathy and love encompassed him. By his death we have lost a loved and respected confrere, but in his life and its rewards we find encouragement for the possessors of kindly hearts and doers of good deeds. If the measure of human responsibility be the use made of God's gifts to the individual man, our departed friend fulfilled to the utmost his obligation, and the world is better for his work and example. Let us all work for the catholicity of our profession, and oppose dogma only by the presentation of irrefutable truth. Whenever the commercialist threatens let us think of the unfitness of his doctrine for our true physician who sees the birth of a new life in pain and suffering, who sees the full and rounded life slip gently back to the arms of its Creator, who must be confidant and comforter, who soils his hands with unnameable filth, and jeopardizes his own life that others may escape peril and suffering. Fear not that in the end a reward will be lacking. A medical profession true to its old ideals will be to the great public as the loved country physician to his flock, honored and respected; guide, counsellor, and friend. ORATION ON SURGERY ALEXANDER HUGH FERGUSON, M. D. Chicago Ladies and Gentlemen:-Standing before this learned body for the first time, I am affected by conflicting emotions, by those of pleasure in being with you, and by those of regret at not having been here before. I cannot conceive of a greater honor in the life of any man than that of addressing such a professional body as this association. To look around this room and behold the smiling faces of distinguished and generous friends would stir to the core a more phlegmatic nature than mine. For the moment I fail to find words that adequately express my appreciation of your compliment. Permit me frankly to say that it was not within the limits of my ambition to resist your kind invitation, not that I had no friends among you, but that I needed more, and also that I might observe the wise injunction that: "The friends thou hast and their adoption tried, I am fully aware that your association wields a vast influence and power, not alone in its own state, but also throughout the entire Union. Its deliberations and productions are profitably read, studied, and digested by members of similar bodies of many and far distant states. Not a few of your members have gained international reputation, and, judging from the original and practical papers published year by year, by you, there is no doubt in my mind in the valuable legacy that is to be handed down to posterity. Your high professional attainments, I am sure, forestall any necessity for a lengthy oration from me on surgery. I |