PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. The Forward Vision. SAMUEL M. GARLICK, M.D., BRIDGEPORT. Members of the Connecticut Medical Society: We read in the Prayer Book of Edward the Confessor "There was neuer anything by the wit of man so well deuised, er so surely established, which (in continuance of time) hath not been corrupted, the first and original grounds improued. If a manne would searche out shall finde that the same was not ordayneed❞ It is hard for any age, or for any group of men, to imagine, much less to appreciate, the difficulties of its predecessors. To this common difficulty our profession is no exception. We often hear people, and sometimes our own associates, speaking contemptuously of the work and ideas of the Fathers. Thoughtful people cannot share the sneer. They remember that in each generation there are those who make effort to face all God's truth and to meet all of man's duty. In every generation there are "seven thousand which have not bowed unto Baal." There is no better programme, no better service than that. We, the world indeed, owe an immeasurable debt to the Fathers. Their shortcomings, the mistakes they have made, do not prove their efforts ineffectual or their purpose mistaken. They only reveal the frailty of human nature. The debt we owe to the Fathers is indeed immeasurable, can never be appreciated, represents an honorable claim which can never be paid. In the late fifteenth century, during the period of medieval medicine, when dissection was forbidden by the clergy on the ground that it was "impious to mutilate the form made in the image of God”—although there is abundant evidence that such impiety held, only when used for scientific purposes and where the spark of life was extinct, not when effected by the rack and the wheel and such other clerical rather than medical instru ments; in this medieval, dark age of medicine the gentle, fascinating Bishop Berkeley wrote, "The seeds of things seem to lie latent in the air: . . . . the whole atmosphere seems alive. There is everywhere acid to corrode and seed to engender." How true indeed it is, that as life and death flow co-mingled in our bodies, so are they no less co-mingled in all the multiple and varied relations of surging life in the strenuosities of these modern days. It is of this same erudite Bishop that Pope writes, "possessed of every virtue under heaven"; and concerning whom Lord Byron wrote, "When Bishop Berkeley said 'there is no matter' and proved it,-'twas no matter what he said." How easily that which seems new is ancient and that which really is ancient masquerades as new, may be well illustrated by a further quotation from this same profound thinker and keen philosopher of the famous Kilkenny School and old Trinity College, Dublin. Speaking of those who "betake themselves to distilled spirits" he says, "it is not improbable they are led gradually to the use of those poisons by a complaisant pharmacy, too much used in the modern practice, palsy drops, poppy cordials, plague waters, and such like, which being in truth nothing but drams disguised, and coming from the apothecaries, are considered only as medicines." The encyclopedic, if not omniscient Bishop, advises the use of "tar water" for all the ailments under the sun. It would thus appear, that to this extent at least, an Anti-Narcotic Law was foreshadowed and even at that early date a "Propaganda for Reform" was the need of the times. Whilst, however, we are considering the relative value and usefulness of the work of our ancestors, it behooves us to hold an even balance; to keep in mind the fact that often "praises are without reason lavished on the dead and that the honors due only to excellence are paid to antiquity." This is *Since writing this paper the accuracy of this inference has been questioned and my attention has been called to a book, "The Popes and Science," by Dr. James W. Walsh. While to me not altogether convincing as an argument, Dr. Walsh's book merits and should have careful perusal by the seeker for truth. |