am 35?” 
A VALEDICTORY ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATES 
DELIVERED AT THE CLOSE OF THE 
FORTY-FIRST SESSION OF THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT 
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE, / 
FEBRUARY 28, 1878. 
Ry j. m. d. 
Professor ok Anatomy and Operative Surgery of of the Faculty. 
PUBLISHED 23 "HT pa:EQ"Cr33S'X'- 
LOUISVILLE, KY.: 
PRINTED BY JOHN P. MORTON AND COMPANY. 
1878. “WHAT AM I?” 
A VALEDICTORY ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATES 
DELIVERED AT THE CLOSE OF THE 
FORTY-FIRST SESSION OF THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT 
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE, 
FEBRUARY 28, 1878. 
By J. M. BODINE, M. D. 
Professor of Anatomy and Operative Surgery of the Eye, and Dean of the Faculty, 
LOUISVILLE, KY.: 
PRINTED BY JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY, 
1878. “WHAT AM IV” 
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: 
If what I am about to say to you appears to be inap- 
propriate from an abstract point of view, it will, perhaps, 
assume another complexion if you but reflect that we 
stand, as it were, in the shadow of death. 
We have had sounded in our ears the solemn litany, 
“In the midst of life we are in death.” Five, who, in 
the heyday of hope, started in the race with you for 
commencement honors, have fallen by the way and left 
us to follow a little farther on in the caravan that moves 
to the pale realms of shade, and there spread with them 
our “silent tents” on the camping-grounds of death. 
Grateful and reverential memory also brings up the 
venerable form of the last of the founders of this insti- 
tution, whose noble life honored our profession, who has 
lately died, loved and lamented, whose funeral honors 
various cities repeat, and whose well-deserved eulogium 
is to be pronounced in our sorrowing hearing ere we 
part. 
Having reached a golden autumn, we can discern, 
with less embarrassment to reason, why this ripe shock 
of wisdom and skill was gathered to the garner; but why 
the morning flowers, with the dew of promise upon them, “ WHAT AM I?" 
4 
should fade and fall, suggests an inquiry that baffles 
thought, and can only be compassed by faith. The 
question very naturally arises, “What am I?” and 
whither do I tend? 
Is life, indeed, but a vanishing vapor? Or does man 
live on to grow in knowledge, to expand in capacity, and 
to broaden in bliss? 
If death ends all, then how vain seem all earthly pur- 
suits, and especially the desire that leads men to endeavor 
to thread the labyrinths of science! 
If more than matter—more than vital organization — 
if immortal, then no doom is hopeless, and death is the 
door to delight. 
These and kindred thoughts press from the soul of 
every man the serious inquiry “What am I?” 
The brute and insect creation make no mistakes in 
life, but each one fulfills its destiny— 
“ Like as a star 
That maketh not haste, 
That taketh not rest, 
And each one fulfilling 
His God given ’hest.” 
Instinct is a fixed and invariable intelligence in the 
animal or insect by which it is enabled to perform nec- 
essary acts in a perfect way, and is not the product of 
reasoning or in any respect voluntary, but it is the 
Divine law implanted in the lower animals as the gov- 
erning principle of their being, and from which they 
can not depart. It can not degenerate; it can not be 
improved. By these natural and God-given endowments 
each animal species is enabled to hold its place in the 
world against all ordinary contingencies. The young “ WHAT AM I?" 
5 
bee, for instance, comes into existence with a physical 
organism adequate to the work it must do, and the 
architecture and industry of every honey-comb and 
hive are patterned after the same and perfect principles 
of Geometry and Political Economy that have governed 
all bees since they were winged amid the sweets of the 
Garden of Eden. It is fully endowed from birth with 
instinctive impulses and capabilities adequate to inaug- 
urating, continuing, and completing all the work and 
relations possible to its existence. While physiological 
forces perfect by fixed laws its animal organization, in- 
stinctive forces adjust its relations to all other members 
of the bee community, .to the seasons, to its sources of 
supply and capacity for production. 
Man has, perhaps, two instincts; namely, to feed and 
to self-preservation. But man is a reasoning being. The 
power to progress from the merest elements of knowl- 
edge up to the highest achievements of educated mind, 
and at the greatest heights of learning to take ravishing 
views of far-stretching and unexplored fields, is the qual- 
ity which differentiates him—together with moral convic- 
tions based upon intellectual apprehension of truth, duty* 
and destiny—from the brute creation. Man has the power 
to adapt means to ends. A correct apprehension of right 
ends, and of the proper means of attaining them, consti- 
tute the supreme function and felicity of reason. 
The comparison of judgments leading from a major 
through a minor premise to a correct conclusion is syllo- 
gistic reasoning, or logic. The broadest definition that 
can be given of logic is the art of detecting error and 
enforcing truth. The science of logic is the classified 
knowledge we have concerning those acts and processes 6 
“ WHAT AM If" 
of the mind intervening our observation of facts and 
axioms and the farthest removed deductions and the 
largest generalizations. The power to reason accurately 
is the grandest of all talents, and the richest reward of 
patient and persevering study. It is this power that has 
uplifted the mountain-minds on the plain of human his- 
tory. It is this power that has enabled man to float the 
waters and ferry the deep, to sink the shafts and rear the 
columns of science, to tame the elements and harness 
them to the car of progress; to analyze the mind and 
body, to apprehend the laws of life, the agents for the 
mitigation of pain, and for the prevention and cure of 
disease. All that beautifies and blesses society we owe 
to cultured reason. The illogical mind degrades man, 
and tends toward a plane even below the level of the 
brute. The barbarian is generally unthinking, or his 
reason ranges a narrow field. All civilization is but the 
expression of the triumph of human reason. This vic- 
tory Art monuments, Poetry sings, and Science jewels. 
Errors in reasoning generally result from argumentation 
based upon a superficial survey or a partial collection of 
facts. The most correct and exhaustive reasoning is 
always the product of the largest induction. The pro- 
gramme of investigation is: First, observation; second, 
experiment; third, inference drawn from a number 01 
facts of the same class, and inference drawn from a fact 
which either belongs, or is assumed to belong, to a specific 
class. To employ the first method we have simply to use 
our senses; the second, we must, for example, use our 
forge, crucible, etc., in the analysis of substances, or try 
the effect of a class of motives on a large number of 
men; for the third, or inductional, we must employ the “ WHAT AM 77” 
7 
4 
analogical method, as the spectrum-reader is enabled 
to construct the mineral geography of a distant world. 
Reasoning from a few correlated facts is the supreme 
source of error, and men of culture are not free from 
the dominating power of this specious sophistry. The 
scientific enthusiast is prone to overlook the fact that he 
is not a universalist but a specialist, and that the very 
observations and studies that have made him a scientist 
confine his experience to a narrow range, which he essays 
to apply to hypotheses that belong to different and diverse 
fields of investigation. A moment’s reflection will enable 
any candid man to see that almost any thing can be estab- 
lished or overthrown by the consideration of a limited 
number of particulars. To first view the earth seems a 
plane; a larger observation of facts leads to the conclu- 
sion that it is a globe. Some men have succeeded in the 
learned professions without being trained in the schools; 
ergo, the self-made man is superior to the graduate. 
The Breton mariner, when he puts to sea, prays, 
“ Keep me, my God; my boat is so small and the ocean 
so wide.” So should we be modest in the expression of 
opinion, for the continent of facts and the sea of princi- 
ples are very large, and we are limited in the range of 
observation and faltering and feeble in the treatment of 
facts. The investigator in every department of science 
should be humble and careful, ever remembering that 
the One Infinite mind only grasps the universal, and 
that man in his intellectual relations to many problems 
is just where he was at the beginning— 
“ An infant crying in the night, 
An infant crying for the light, 
And with no language but a cry.” 8 
“ WHAT AM I?” 
I could wish there was more in medical studies, as 
ordinarily pursued, to cultivate the logical powers. The 
student first reads and readily receives the dictum of 
authority. The next step is simply one of observation. 
The student examines the skeleton, and his eye and 
memory take and treasure all the lore it has to impart. 
From the dry bones he goes to the cadaver, which, while 
it excites curiosity and reveals wonders, simply demands 
discrimination and skillful manipulation with the knife. 
Next he is introduced to the laboratory, where every 
thing is a matter of sense and experiment. All these 
stages of instruction are demonstrative, leaving no room 
for hypothesis, no ground for premises. Finally, he goes 
to therapeutics, practical medicine, and chirurgery, and 
these are largely taught synthetically and objectively, and 
so his opportunity is small of becoming acquainted with 
the science and adept in the art of logic. It is true, too, 
that many of our young men enter upon the study of 
medicine with insufficient previous training in intellec- 
tual gymnastics. A knowledge of Latin was formerly 
deemed a scholarly prerequisite to the study of medi- 
cine, and the pupil had the advantage of well-discip- 
lined powers with which to begin. The study of this 
beautiful language, which crystallizes the technique of 
the medical art, trains the mind to abstraction, and by 
the difficulties of construction and grammatical analysis, 
and by tracing derivatives through their inflexions to 
their verbal roots, cultivates the habit of discerning rela- 
tions and pursuing things and thoughts to their sources. 
Such a study superinduces the logical habit. If all our 
physicians were trained dialecticians, and would not only 
collate, but compare and generalize facts, what strides “WHAT AM 1?” 
9 
our profession would make in developing the hygienic 
and healing art! 
There have been, and are, in our profession, men who 
were dialectically the equals of any, and it is largely to 
their powers of abstraction and argumentation that we 
owe all the knowledge we have. 
“ Doctors disagree.” That has passed into a proverb. 
But it is more because, like the knights at the crossing 
of the way, they see opposite sides of the shield. The 
habit is to meet dictum with dictum, experience with 
experience, rather than reason with reason. If you have 
not already done so, I invite you to make logic one of 
your post-graduate studies. At any rate, acquire the 
habit of abstracting yourself from your environment 
and reading attentively, reflectively, appropriatingly, and 
assimilatively. Do not fall into the pernicious error that 
a physician should concentrate all his time and talents 
directly upon his profession. No man has become emi- 
nent in any vocation of life who has not possessed gen- 
eral and diversified information. Some one has said, 
“ It is better to know every thing about something, than 
something about every thingyet so closely correlated 
are all sciences, natural and mental and moral, that to 
know every thing about something is to know some- 
thing about every thing. Not only does the science of 
medicine include a knowledge of the stereotyped seven 
departments as they appear in our curriculum, but has 
close and indivisible relations to the laws of mind and 
the effect of moral motivities upon life. The physician 
must understand logic, that he may trace the relations 
between cause and effect, and distinguish the non causa 
from the pro causa. 10 
“ WHAT AM I?" 
I need not catalogue the books you may profitably 
read. All works that include more than they syllable, 
that make the mind halt ere it passes and compel it 
to wrestle with an idea for its mastery, and that sug- 
gest, richly, reflections of your own, are of the greatest 
worth. 
Strive by observation, reading, and reflection to arrive 
at that point of dialectical excellence at which you will 
be able readily to analyze propositions, eliminate ambig- 
uities, correlate facts, and thus, by seeing truth in new 
relations and combinations, to unite the varied prismatic 
rays that form the perfect light. Ponder principles with 
a view of finding new and valuable applications of them, 
of detecting sophisms to discard them, and thus become 
facile princeps in the interpretation of phenomena, the 
diagnosis of disease, and the formulation of remedies. 
See that your mind is not a mere reservoir to receive 
and retain, but rather a great furnace in which all dross 
shall be consumed and the value of every thing tried as 
by fire. 
A school of opinion claiming to be scientific, most 
prominently represented, perhaps, by Dr. Buechner, of 
Germany, has of late been growing, which assumes to 
hold on rational grounds not only the essential unity 
of all life, but the dogma in its fullest scope that life 
is always and wholly the product of organization, ceas- 
ing utterly when the organic autonomy fails. “ The 
only immortality of man,” says the ablest exponent of 
this new view, “is the immortality of men,” i. e. of 
the race. This is a play upon words, which signifies 
nothing, for not only do we know that no living per- 
sonality has stake in such a future, but we know that “ WHAT AM If ” 
11 
races and worlds are as surely mortal as individuals. 
The whole history of humanity will vanish from the 
face of the universe, an unrecorded and forgotten thing, 
unless written in some Spiritual Remembrance. That 
over all that platform of existence which we see, life is 
associated with structure, is no proof whatever that it 
is the product of carbon, haloids, and gases. No sur- 
geon’s probe or savant’s chemistry has ever made con- 
tact with life. In all forms the subtile essence illudes 
the instrumentations that interrogate and torture mat- 
ter. Away with the mechanical theory that, looking 
alone to the sun, sums up the beginning, duration, and 
end of man, in that fantastic formula, “from fiery cloud 
to fiery cloud.” Shall every unconscious atom of the 
material universe be thus vested with immortality, and 
against every analogy known, intelligence, love, and 
duty alone be doomed to die ? Far wiser and more 
likely appears to me the statement embodying the ear- 
lier and nearly universal faith of mankind: “The dust 
shall return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall 
return unto God who gave it.” 
I think you will pardon me if I warn you here and 
now not to fall into the dangerous error of concluding 
that the Bible is a cunningly-devised fable, because you 
can not subject it to the same experimental tests you 
employ in the medical art. Religion has its tests, “ If 
any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the 
doctrine, etc.” Because there are a multiplicity of sects 
you must not hold Christianity responsible. Remember 
that Hydropathy, Homeopathy, and Thomsonianism are 
sects in medicine, and that we do not conclude from 
the variety and variances of the schools that there is 12 
“ WHAT AM I?" 
no medical science. Because there are hypocritical 
professors, do not conclude that there are no genuine 
Christians. Remember that medicine, too, has its pre- 
tenders, empirics, and charlatans. Because there are 
mysteries in the Scriptures do not reject its plain and 
unmistakable truth. As well refuse to see the func- 
tions of the great organs in the human body because 
you are perplexed to discern the office of the spleen or 
to trace the relations between the molecular motions 
of the brain and the outgoings of thought. And is it 
not apposite in this place to inquire whether the indis- 
position of medical men to investigate the claims oi 
revealed religion does not arise from the fact that their 
intellectual powers are so closely confined to induction 
and analogy, to the almost total exclusion of moral 
reasoning? It is worth while to notice the variability 
of human methods of reasoning when applied to re- 
ligion—the alternations of the transcendental and real- 
istic schools of scepticism—while Christianity remains 
massive, sublime, and unscathed, like the pyramids of 
the Lybian desert. No argument of scepticism has 
stood the test of time. Says Emerson: “ Once you 
saw Phoenixes; they are gone. Once our teachers were 
angels of knowledge, and their figures touched the sky. 
Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and limits, 
and they yielded their places to other geniuses.” 
But the Great Physician of Souls, against whose 
system the mighty men of philosophy, science, and 
historical criticism set themselves, stands, still the cen- 
tral figure of time, while the challenge rings out over 
the fields of investigation as clear and clarion-toned as 
when it pealed like a trumpet of doom in the ear of 
perplexed Pilate, “What will you do with Christ?” “WHAT AM I?” 
13 
For all those diseases of the mind and heart which 
are beyond and baffle the pathology and therapeutics of 
the art to which we this day introduce you, the Great 
Physician presents the only healing balm, the only 
panacea for those pains more acute than any that ever 
ran along the quivering nerves. 
It is fabled that the pillars of Seth withstood the 
waters of an universal deluge, and remained erect and 
witnessed the retiring waters of that flood which had 
swallowed up all other monuments of antiquity. So 
has the Gospel survived the fury of that flood which 
has swept over all philosophies and religions which 
have challenged its Divine supremacy. The fact of 
the “survival’' of Christianity proves it the “fittest” re- 
ligion for man ; and considering its humble origin, and 
the humble instrumentalities employed in planting it in 
the world, it is a standing miracle more wonderful than 
any the Evangelists record. I would have you remem- 
ber, young gentlemen, that Theology and Christianity 
are two things. The exposure of the errors or over- 
throw of the theories of the former does not necessarily 
affect the Christian system any more than the exposure 
of the partial reasoning of medical partialists affects the 
great science of which you are disciples. Even should 
Mr. Darwin establish his singular and startling hypoth- 
esis, it would not affect the integrity of the first chapter 
of Genesis. Moses says God made man of the dust, and 
by a second creative act made him “in His image.” Mr. 
Darwin starts the origin of man in an animated atom, 
and through a chain of developing species brings him to 
his present high estate. As following Moses literally, God 
made an animal a living soul by an inspiring breath, so 14 
“ WHAT AM I?" 
the successor of the highest anthropoid might have been 
made rational, moral, and immortal by a like interposition 
of Divine power. One puts an inconceivable duration 
between the first creative act and the climax of develop- 
ment, and the other seems to imply that the interval was 
a short one. But as Geology gave a new rendering to the 
Mosaic cosmogony, turning the literal day into an eon, 
and Philology has rescued the Bible account of creation 
from the oblivion with which, at first, Geology threat- 
ened it. so I do not see that the establishment of Mr. 
Darwin’s theory of the origin of species need to disturb 
our faith in the Bible. 
It is worth while to remind you that Mr. Darwin is a 
communicant in the Church of England. 1 he essential 
religion of Christianity will not die out of the human 
soul. Sooner expect the sun, which clouds may for a 
time obscure, to flicker out of the sky. No, no, the ad- 
vances of thought will only serve to rift the intervening 
clouds and the breath of candid criticism to float the 
sun-dyed fragments away, and in the end the Sun of 
Righteousness will shine down with not a mist between 
to obscure the vision of faith. I am constrained to con- 
fess that, as a consequence of the nature of the studies 
pursued by medical men and the lack of logical train- 
ing, our profession, of all others, is most prone to scep- 
ticism. 
The reason of this is complex. Part of it results 
from the pride of philosophy which is common to pro- 
fessional pursuits; part of it is, in consequence of famil- 
iarity with human suffering, the custom of regarding 
man simply as a pain-afflicted animal, and of observing 
the phenomena incident to the decay and dissolution of “ WHAT AM I?" 
15 
the physical powers; part from frequent and forced ab- 
sence from public worship inseparable from the nature 
of the practitioner’s duties, and principally, as I believe, 
from the neglect to employ purely logical methods of 
thought. The physician is so concerned with the body 
that he seldom penetrates to the spirit. 
The distinguished mechanician Vaucanson had his 
taste for mechanics aroused by accident. As a pun- 
ishment, when a child, he was frequently imprisoned in 
a room in which there was no furniture but a clock; 
to relieve the tedium of confinement he minutely exam- 
ined its several parts, and their relation to each other, 
and the end of its construction. This developed his 
mechanical aptitudes and tastes. But suppose while he 
was studying cog and wheel and dial, and when he had 
discovered the moving cause in weights and pendulum, 
he had stopped short of the question, “Who made the 
clock ?” he would have been like many medical men who 
fail to differentiate causation and results. 
The pupil is tempted to think that every thing can 
be accounted for by the term law, without one thought 
of the Supreme Legislator and Governor of the uni- 
verse. Law is an ambiguous term, and we derive our 
ideas concerning it from the imperfect analogy which 
human legislation suggests. Says Dr. Carpenter: “It 
might be wished that the term law could be altogether 
banished from science, if it was not that, when carefully 
examined, any law of man’s designing is found to be 
nothing else than an expression of certain predeter- 
mined uniformities of action of the Governing Power.” 
In the metaphysical haze which floats around the 
arbitrary term “law” the pupil fails to discern God, 16 
“WHAT AM I?" 
and by a parity of method he sometimes also fails to 
find his soul. 
Speaking of life, Bichat writes: “The functions of 
the animal form two distinct classes. One of these con- 
sists of an habitual succession of assimilation and con- 
cretion. By the other he perceives surrounding objects, 
reflects on his sensations, performs voluntary motions 
under their influence, and generally communicates, by 
the voice, his pleasures, or his pains, his desires or his 
fears. The assembled functions of the latter class form 
the animal life. 
If I ask Vaucanson what is the cause of the wheels 
going round in the clock and the hands on the dial? he 
does not say the weights and pendulum, but the intelli- 
gence of the designer. If I ask Bichat what is the cause 
of sensation, perception, and will? he says animal life. 
If I ask what is animal life? he says will, perception, 
and sensation. Is this not reasoning in a circle? You 
will find many physicians who hold that the best man 
is the highest product of the best organs and circum- 
stances, and all that is necessary to perfect man is to 
improve his physical organization, give him good and 
wholesome diet at hygienic intervals, supply him with 
liberal quantities of pure oxygen and sunlight, clothe 
him with suitable raiment and comfortable shelter, pre- 
serve him from all mephitic influences, provide him with 
congenial company and pursuits, and the conditions of 
his happiness will be established, and, being felicitous in 
his circumstances, he will be virtuous. This would be 
so if man were merely an animal, but he is something 
more. He is influenced and improved by the character 
of the impressions made upon him through his senses, “WHAT AM I?" 
17 
but from within proceed the greater and grander ele- 
ments of his higher life. He has sources of thought, 
feeling, hope, joy, and sorrow, to which inferior animals 
are strangers; and, culture him as you may, his appre- 
hensions and aspirations will leap the hedge-rows of 
education, and, like the English lark, springing from its 
fragrant nest in the meadow, will soar and sing toward 
the sun. 
Man is largely indebted to his physical organism; but 
when bone and blood and muscle and membranes and 
gland and ganglia are in perfect health, the heart may 
be out of harmony, and though it beats the standard 
measure of pulsations, it may be burdened with a sigh 
or sorrow that makes that perfect body a prison-house. 
The physician is always demanding facts. The prevail- 
ing method in our medical colleges is to teach medicine 
purely as an experimental art; and man, as an animal, is 
looked at in every articulation of his framework, and in 
every organ of his anatomy. The cry is, “Away with 
theory; give us practiced All this is but saying “see- 
ing is believing,” and yet no two men see exactly alike. 
Lalande said: “I have gazed far into infinite space 
with my telescope, and star after star and system after 
system have kindled their splendors in the spectrum, but 
there is no God between'my object-glass and Uranus— 
for I have scanned the intervening field.” Ehrenberg 
turns his microscope upon a drop of stagnant water 
and declares that it swarms with infusoria wonderfully 
wrought; he discovers myriads of creatures crystallized 
in a single cubic inch of slate, and he says at the other 
end of the universe—the infinitesimal—“ I see no foot- 
prints of a God.” The chemist analyzes the elements 18 
“WHAT AM I?" 
and finds their constituents, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, 
and nitrogen, but his retort has revealed to him no God. 
And so the surgeon says: “ I have been through man 
with my scalpel; I have looked at all his cells, and 
I have resolved him into his elements, and he has 
no soul. Man is a compound of bones and blood, of 
bowels and brains, of potash and phosphorus. Look 
here! This is a perfect picture of a heart—it is an 
admirable blood-pump—and this is a splendid brain, a 
curious congeries of cells and labyrinthine fibres. In 
neither head nor heart have I found a soul. 
Ah, if Lalande could have looked at the heavens 
with the eye of a Newton, the stars would have been 
eloquent of the Divine glory, and the tented firmament 
would have been frescoed by the Divine handiwork. 
Had Ehrenberg looked at the microscopic Crustacea 
with the glasses of Hugh Miller, he would have seen 
traced the footprints of the Creator. If the chemist 
would but analyze with the retort of J. Lawrence Smith, 
he would discern the evidences of a creating cause in 
every atom and gas. If the surgeon would but see man 
with the penetrating vision of a Paget, he would behold 
reason enthroned upon the brain and love mitred in the 
heart and immortality templed in a soul. We may call 
it by whatever name a cavilling caprice may elect, but 
man thinks, feels, wills, acts. The why and wherefore 
of his thinking is not answered by scalpel, retort, or 
microscope. 
Diogenes, the cynic, left his tub, and with a lamp 
went through the market-place to find a man. Had he 
gone within himself he would have found the object of 
his search. There is an inner world, and he who would 44 WHAT AM / ?” 
19 
employ material tests to its analysis is as silly as a 
philosopher who would seek to weigh universal gravity 
upon steelyards and balances. If what can be deter- 
mined by mere anatomy and physiology or chemistry 
is to be the standard of judgment in estimating the 
worth of a man, then many .animals rival him in phys- 
ical organism. 
Spence relates that Mr. Pope one day was with an 
English Lord, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came 
in. “Nephew,” said his Lordship, “you have the honor 
of beholding the two greatest men in England.” The 
nephew responded: “I do n’t know how great men 
you may be, but I do n’t like your looks. I have often 
bought a man better than both of you, all muscles and 
bones, for ten guineas.” The method I am reprobat- 
ing estimates men by avoirdupois weight, and measures 
them with the draper’s tape-line. “The nerves,” says 
Cabaniss, “they are the man.” And is the end of our 
noble profession to reduce us to a mere pig-iron mate- 
rialism ? If we are to understand our art to mean 
simply knowledge *of man as an animal and his dis- 
eases, in what respect are we different from the veteri- 
nary surgeon ? 
But how many, alas! are prepared to give an affirma- 
tive answer to Emerson’s catechism: “Are the opinions 
of men on right and wrong, on fete or causation, at the 
mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief 
in God no deeper than a stomach evidence ?” According 
to this degrading theory, if you would make man a 
poet, give him hasheesh; if an orator, port wine; if 
conscience-smitten, prescribe blue-mass. If there be a 
mere animal law of hereditary descent governing mat- “WHAT AM I?" 
20 
ter, and, through that, mind and morals, what can one 
do against congenital diseases, against scrofula and a 
score of other maleficent forces known to be transmis- 
sible ? Where are we to locate the responsibility, by 
which we claim the right to enact laws and to inflict 
penalties? If man is on a level with brute animals, 
where is the satisfaction that meets his desires as those 
of others are met? 
The aspect of the brute creation is one of happiness- 
How wide the gulf between that and the experience of 
man! The little sparrow, twittering its gratitude under 
my window for the crumbs upon which it makes its 
modest meal, is just as happy as a bird can be. The 
insect brood, singing in the shimmers of the summer 
sunset, what brook they of the morrow? How com- 
placently does the caterpillar weave its shroud and 
wait its transfiguration! What a difference between 
the cuckoo’s note and the “Song of the Shirt!” 
The whole range of nature does not afford a Five 
Points of Wretchedness. Ah, if there is no future for 
man—of all God’s creation the grandest figure is the 
meanest! 
I propose now to indicate some of the temptations 
to which I think physicians are peculiarly liable. And 
the first I mention is familiarity with scenes of suffer- 
ing. This tends to blunt the tender sensibilities, for the 
effect of frequently repeated emotions is to lessen rather 
than to strengthen their power. The young surgeon 
as he tries his prentice hand trembles; but by repeated 
operations he gains steadiness of nerve. For the prac- 
tical ends of surgery this is well, as the surgeon, even 
more than the physician, requires great self-possession— “ WHAT AM I?" 
21 
the cool calm of intellect in the presence of peril. Re- 
ligion is so much a matter of emotion, so far as it is an 
experience, that the effect of long medical service is to 
create a condition of heart not easily accessible to that 
class of feelings which are, or are supposed to be, the 
the testimony of the Divine favor. 
I do not mean exactly to say that the physician nec- 
essarily becomes what is known as hard-hearted. No 
class of men are more given to philanthropy. Very 
much of their ministration is a free-will offering to the 
poor. Their heroic self-sacrifice, manifested in time of 
pestilence, when the greed of gain and pride of charac- 
ter afford no sufficient explanation for their exposure to 
the plague, is a matter that needs only to be mentioned 
to be honored. The daring they have manifested on the 
field of battle, performing calmly their acts of mercy 
while the air is whistling with bullets and the scream 
of hurtling shells is heard above, have shown that patri- 
otism and philanthropy were in holy wedlock in their 
chivalrous breasts. Ours is a profession of which a 
reverend Bishop has spoken as eminent for genius, 
learning, and humanity; for industry, experiment, and 
persevering, self-denying, perilous researches; for a pa- 
tient submission to peevishness, a generous sacrifice oi 
pleasure, and a manly forgiveness of the basest selfish- 
ness and ingratitude. Speaking of his own obligations 
to our profession, he says: “To medicine. I owe an 
unspeakable debt. Whenever I have eaten the bread 
of sorrow, or drunk the cup of affliction, she has been 
my Good Samaritan; she has calmed my anxieties, miti- 
gated my pains, awakened my hopes, and often counted 
my pulse, and cooled my tongue at the midnight as 22 
“WHAT AM I?" 
well as the morning watch; and when, with tears, I 
have offered remuneration, she has gently replaced my 
slender purse beneath my pillow.” 
It is not so much, then, that humane interest is lost 
for the sufferer, as that familiarity with suffering tends 
to make the physician stoical in all things that relate to 
himself. He becomes so accustomed to serve others in 
suffering that he becomes, relatively, indifferent to him- 
self. He is apt often to be perplexed by the problem of 
pain, and to ask the annoying question, “Would a God 
who is infinitely compassionate entail so much of want 
and woe on his creatures as exist?” With many the 
answer to this is Atheism. They argue, “ Better no 
God than an Infinite Borgia on the Throne of the 
Universe.” If the inquiry ended with a study of the 
pathological and therapeutic indications of pain, the 
physician might proceed to its relief without a shadow 
of scepticism creeping over the mind; but the question 
that will not down at the bidding, and which puzzles 
thought is, “ Why does God permit pain ?” Many, fail- 
ing to answer this satisfactorily, dismiss it by saying, 
“There is no God.” 
Of course we can not think the existence of pain is 
essential to the Divine happiness. If we find any key 
to the solution of the mystery, it must be in the dis- 
covery of some rectoral or beneficent offices it per- 
forms for the creature. The mere sentinel theory is 
inadequate to afford the desired solution. It has color 
of acceptability only when applied to the eye and the 
general periphery of the body; and yet it is not satis- 
fying to say that the eye is so sensitive that it closes 
when any disagreeable atom or acid threatens it, and “WHAT AM I?” 
23 
that having felt pain once it is ever on the guard 
against things that produce it. God could have en- 
cased the eye in a crystal that would have thoroughly 
protected it from dust or acids. The deep organs of the 
body are subject to frequent pains, and these surely can 
not be regarded as pickets thrown out or sentinels on 
outpost duty; they are rather enemies in the very heart 
of the camp. Nor is it sufficient to say of a large 
class of pains that they are rectoral, Nature’s conatus, 
by which it seeks to relieve itself of abnormal condi- 
tions; such, for instance, as the effort Nature makes to 
eject a gall-stone. An anodyne administered relieves 
the pain and allows Nature’s writ of ejectment to prose- 
cute its execution. Nor is it conclusive to say that the 
pleasure succeeding relief from pain is a fit and full 
compensation for the agony experienced by the sufferer. 
The atheist finds his solution of pain by looking on 
animal life as simply the product of an infinite series of 
changes in nature, and pain as a necessary condition 
of a physical organism, as friction is inseparable from 
all mechanical operations. The physician has been so 
accustomed to study man as a mere animal being that 
the temptation to the atheistic view is peculiarly strong, 
but is the result of a partial study of man and a hasty 
generalization of purely physical facts. 
If the physician would carry his meditations farther 
forward into a wider field, and take in man as an im- 
mortal and responsible moral being, a subject of a great 
Theocratic government, supported by a vast system of 
rewards and punishments, he would bring new factors 
into the problem, that would assist him to a solution 
without the necessity of resorting to atheism. Once 24 
“WHAT AM I?" 
in the field of thought suggested by the existence of a 
God and the immortality of man, he would soon have 
attention riveted on the fact that there is mental as well 
as physical pain, and that every violation of mental or 
moral law is inseparably related to its appropriate pun- 
ishment as every disturbed condition of the body is 
with uneasiness or pain. There is no difference of 
opinion as to the fact that a moral wrong is accom- 
panied with what we call compunction of conscience, 
or remorse. This is the soul’s protest against wrong- 
doing. But sin works its own insensibility. 
“ Vice is a monster of so frightful mien 
As to be hated needs but to be seen; 
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” 
Now what is needed is that there should be some 
-sharp, goading process prodding the body and shooting 
conviction through the nerves to the consciousness of 
the offender. Nearly all moral evil takes the direction 
of and ends in sensuality. If the drunkard never had 
a headache, a nausea, or shaky nerves, or delirium tre- 
mens, and the dreadful draught were allowed to pervert 
reason and conscience, where would the evils end pro- 
duced by inebriation ? 
Besides, others are deterred from like courses of evil 
by seeing the pain wrought in the bodies of offenders. 
Thus pain, that is the result of wrong-doing, is not only 
a penalty to the guilty, but a warning to the innocent. 
Again, pain quickens in us an apprehension that we are 
living under a moral government, and awakens desires 
for a better state of existence. 
No one doubts the benignity of purpose for which 
men enter society and organize governments, yet law— “ WHAT AM I?" 
25 
the administration of public justice—is a terrible aven- 
ger to the guilty. 
Well, if God’s government exists for the weal of 
souls, and goodness is the highest expression of citizen- 
ship in the universe, the Great Sovereign must protect 
the loyal to right and duty, not only by punishing the 
guilty, but by making outlawry heinous. 
Pain is the reading of God’s riot-act to the mob, bid- 
ding it disperse or suffer. It is true, too, that patient 
suffering has a very chastening and elevating effect. 
Out of it are born the virtues of fortitude, meekness, 
and resignation. It furnishes the occasion for the exer- 
cise of the sweetest amenities and charities of human 
nature. Sympathy and the loving sisterhood of graces 
that follow in its train gather about the couch of suf- 
fering. 
Pain is a great teacher of human fraternity. Plague 
and pestilence have done more than any other agency 
to make men conscious of the close and indivisible 
bond that holds the race in brotherhood. 
Among a depraved people in the East, the Asiatic 
cholera was born in the slums of their degradation, 
and, marching westward, princes and peasants, sages 
and savages, fell a common prey to the dread destroyer. 
Thus the pestilence teaches the unity of the race and 
a community of interest. On its yellow flag is in- 
scribed: “If one member suffer, all suffer together.” 
Neither rank nor riches can exalt us above the 
reach of pestilence born in the bogs and lazar-houses 
of human woe. The plague, generated among the 
filthy sailors of the Piraeus, marched down the Agora 
of Athens, and climbed the Acropolis and smote the 26 
“WHAT AM I?" 
Areopagus. What a mighty argument does pestilence 
present to civilization and Christianity to reclaim and 
reform the masses weltering in the wastes of wretched- 
ness! The Canongates of vice must be reformed and 
purified, else the destruction that wasteth at noonday 
and night will issue from the haunts of hunger and 
hells of crime to visit the vitals of our best beloved 
and lay waste our own fair homes. 
The second peculiar temptation I mention is that 
much that impresses the ordinary beholder as a testi- 
mony to the value of Christian experience to support 
the dying is readily referred by the physician to other 
causes. Death-bed scenes are often referred to as evi- 
dences of Christianity. The Doctor knows that resig- 
nation to death is often the direct product of decayed 
and enfeebled physical powers or the subjugating 
influences of pain. Also, that certain nervous condi- 
tions, produced by disease or the influence of opiates, 
are the cause of rapturous visions that delight the sick 
and cheer the dying. He hears so much made of this 
at funerals that, while he in his goodness of heart will 
allow the preacher the benefit of the innocent decep- 
tion, and the bereaved friends the comfort afforded by 
the pleasing misapprehension, he secretly sets this all 
down to superstition and ignorance, and then proceeds 
to include all religious experience in the like category. 
This is fallacious reasoning. 
Christ’s Christianity teaches the sublime art of holy 
living. It lays down this test: “By their fruits ye 
shall know them.” The Gospel should be tried by 
itself. Let a man adopt Christ’s principles and obey 
his commandments, and he can be trusted in all the “ WHAT AM If ” 
27 
relations of life, and he needs no ravishing ecstacies in 
the hour of death to assure survivors that he has joined 
the spirits of just men made perfect 
Lastly, the physician is tempted to misanthropy. He 
becomes the victim of so much and constantly cumula- 
tive ingratitude that he says, in his haste, all men are 
base ingrates. How often do those he has most faith- 
fully served, whose diseases have produced his keenest 
and most protracted anxieties, even robbing him of 
appetite for food or ability for sleep, turn against him 
with words of undeserved reproach and transfer their 
influence and patronage to some itinerant pretender or 
unblushing local charlatan ? How often, too, is his 
hard-earned fee withheld from him by those whose feet 
should be winged to bear him the price of his skill 
and fidelity! 
Let him think of the Great Exemplar who “came 
unto his own, and his own received him not.” Let him 
think that a richer benediction than human applause 
may light from on high upon the scene of his toils. 
Let him comfort himself in the inalienable love oi 
that faithful few who appreciate his worth and hold 
him enshrined in their heart of hearts as the most 
sacred of images. 
And now, young gentlemen, permit me to remind 
you that success is, generally, the product and reward 
of unremitting toil. If you make the most, in after 
life, of the advantages we have sought to afford you 
here, you must think; for patient, powerful, and per- 
severing thought alone can make you intellectually 
strong—while diligent, careful, and consecutive practice 
will alone make you skillful and successful. I he world 28 
“ WHAT AM I?" 
to which you go has many allurements to decoy you 
to a dalliance with duty, and the surrender of your 
reason to the fancies and follies that but beguile for 
awhile to wreck and ruin. 
When Ulysses sailed the shore of the Sirens he 
filled his companions’ ears with wax, and had himself 
tied to the mast, and thus escaped their enchantment. 
If you would avoid the shoals upon which reason and 
conscience are so often wrecked, close the senses and 
bind the intellect with strong withes. Finally, cherish 
and cultivate that profession to which we, this hour, 
formally introduce you. Enter upon it with motives 
transcending the desire for reward, whether of pelf or 
power. Honor it by diligent and faithful service, and 
as an instrument of usefulness. Take to yourself the 
comfort that much of your work is purely humanita- 
rian, and that its recompense is not to be measured 
by the money standard, or by even the gratitude of 
those whom you freely serve. 
Go on your way in the line of perpetual rectitude, 
and walk it unfalteringly. 
“ What is your duty here? To tend 
From good to better—thence to best; 
Grateful to drink life’s cup—then bend 
Unmurmuring to your bed of rest; 
And so to live, that when the sun 
Of your existence sinks in night, 
Memorials sweet of mercies done 
May shrine your names in memory’s light.” 
And now, gentlemen of the graduating class, the 
best wishes of the faculty go with you. Rejoicing 
always in your success, and proud of any reputation 
you may achieve, for it will be for your Alma Mater, 
as well as for yourselves, we bid you God-speed and 
an affectionate good-bye.