DEATH A UNIVERSAL LAW. 
PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
DELIVERED BEFORE 1'IIE 
IHictjigart State Hleftical Society, 
GEO. E. RANNEY, D. 
LANSING, 
lion. Member of the Mich. State Med. Soe. ; Corresponding Member of the Detroit Medical 
and Library Ass’n ; Hon. Member of the Pere Marquette Med. Soc. ; Member of the 
American Med. Ass’n ; Member of the British Med. Ass’n ; Fellow of the 
British Gynecological Ass’n ; Sup’t Lansing City Hospital ; 
Pres. IT. S. Pension Examining Board of 
Lansing ; Etc., Etc. 
AT ITS 
ANNUAL MEETING, HELD IN FLINT, 
May j and 6, 18Q2. 
Reprint from the Transactions of the Mich. State Medical Societt. [Reprint trom Proceedings of Michigan State Medical Society, 1892.] 
PRESIDENT’S ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
DEATH A UNIVERSAL LAW. 
GEORGE E. RANNEY, M. D., 
Lansing. 
Another year, clustered and freighted with precious memo- 
ries, cherished reminiscences, and honored names, has passed 
into the pages of recorded time. 
We are unpleasantly reminded by a keen sense of personal 
bereavement, and by the portentous shadows stretching from 
the west, of an impending anguish, which quickens and intensi- 
fies the slumbering and dormant consciousness, and awakens us 
to a full and comprehensive realization that we are confronted 
by a deadly and unrelenting foe armed with a mortal sting. 
We recall to mind the names of a battalion of distinguished 
and illustrious men who have joined the silent majority within 
the last twelve months—the heroes of science, the martyrs of 
religion, and the giants of literature. The most recent recruits 
to the viewless world are Lowell, Manning, and Agnew, who 
are among the greatest representatives of literature, theology, 
and medicine. 
1 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
I shall not detain you by a recital of the wonderful strides 
in progressive medicine and its collateral branches during the 
year which has now joined those beyond the flood. In gynae- 
cology, surgery, laryngology, mechanical therapeutics and prac- 
tical medicine, the march of discovery, development, and scien- 
tific expansion, has been gratifying in every department, 
absolutely marvelous in some, and startling, daring, and bewil- 
dering in other lines of the profession. I merely allude to these 
evidences of advancement in our chosen field of labor and 
investigation. 
The yearly review of annual discoveries hitherto made by 
my honored and distinguished predecessors, I shall leave for the 
orators and chairmen of the different sections, choosing rather 
myself to consider some of the phases of the great, irresistible 
and merciless enemy of mankind, and take a cursory glance at 
the countless forces in secret cells and in every conceivable 
form of activity. 
The physician, equipped by long experience, panoplied with 
science, and sustained by a high sense of the great responsi- 
bility he assumes in dealing with human life, goes out to battle 
with the hosts of invisible foes marshalled by the dread 
destroyer, against the health and happiness of our fellow men. 
All that human genius can suggest, all that the combined 
wisdom of the world, all that science can evolve by synthetic 
and analytical power, by chemical transformations or by micro- 
scopical research, extending through a period of two thousand 
years of ceaseless and exacting labor and honest toil, with the 
view of warding off the fatal aim of the winged dart directed 
at the citadel of life, has been invoked, and yet the great con- 
queror still marches on to victory. We may oppose its 
advance, out-flank momentarily, put up barriers, raise obstruc- 
tions, defer the anguish, postpone the agony, and plead with 
lotions and sweet oblivious anodynes for delay, but the enven- 
omed and barbed shaft propelled by the grim monarch, robed 
in solemn white with the insignia of his vocation, pierces the 
tinseled fabric that we offer as a shield, and the end is death. 
Thus we are foiled and stand in the presence and silence of 
death, utterly vanquished, gazing upon the wreck the victor has 
2 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
left. The tenantless tabernacle defies all scrutiny, the secret of 
its change is wrapped within its bosom and its shroud, and 
intensifies and deepens the mystery of life. 
New processes now engage our attention, elemental trans- 
formations begin, because there is no such condition as rest 
in nature; from change to change, we run a ceaseless oscilla- 
tion and perpetual flight. The atoms that compose a plant or a 
planet constantly change with irresistible and restless .activity, 
the germs of the acorn are vitalized with active development 
and life, the leaves of the oak and its swaying branches indicate 
the palsying touch of blight and death. In the lonely flower 
blooming unseen upon a mountain cliff, and the giant planet 
whirling with astounding and startling velocity in boundless 
space, there is a constant change going on in their molecular 
constitution, a perpetual building up and aggregation of matter, 
or a silent and viewless process of disintegration; and decay 
inscribes its invisible and subtle agency upon them and all 
material things. 
Life and death are contending forces, and imperial and 
merciless time is the supreme arbiter. Death is a universal law, 
is coeval with time, and executes his mission and commands 
with inflexible fidelity. He seizes with fatal and remorseless 
grasp every form of organic life. Nothing escapes his con- 
quering march, his icy breath, or his insidious invasion. The 
towering oak and the moaning pine, the proud and haughty 
monarch on his throne, holding within his grasp the fate and 
destiny of empires, and the insect of a day, surrender alike to 
the common enemy, the fell destroyer of all created matter. 
Life is a constant struggle against opposing forces, amid an 
environment of death-dealing agencies. 
We are surrounded by the terrific energies and correlative 
forces of the great destroyer. 
In the torrid heat, the fatal beams, vibrating with impetuous 
zeal and dazzling with the splendors from the throne of light, 
send their countless thousands of appealing humanity to the 
silence of the sepulchre. 
In the cheerless and unbroken solitude of the north, amid 
polar snows and perpetual congelation- -a wild, desolate and 
3 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
weird abode oi the cruel messenger—there in the pale and 
flickering light of the midnight sun, death comes to the weary 
and sleeping victim in noiseless strides, creeps into the slowly 
throbbing and pulsating breast, freezes up the warm currents of 
life, stifles his breath with the artistic tracery of frost evolved 
by struggling life, and the unfortunate awakes no more forever. 
All around us in every house he waits in ambush; in the 
palace of the king and the humble cottage of the peasant, the 
merciless foe of man, crouched possibly in a few drops of 
impure water, or in some inviting and alluring food, or in a gas 
that penetrates the chamber of the sleeping innocent, who 
unconsciously holds gentle communion with his destroyer. 
His emissaries are as the sands of the sea. The countless 
millions of insects that people the sunbeam and inhabit the air 
are the active messengers of the pale monarch of the silent 
realm. 
His agents lurk in the air, in every mephitic gas and 
poisonous vapor. They linger in the vital and life-giving sun- 
beam, they go hand in hand with life itself, watching for the 
time and place to poison the fountain or deposit the germ-pro- 
ducing cell, the tubercle, the pulmonary bacillus, or enter by 
some one of the million avenues to the citadel of life and cut 
short a brilliant career. 
In every house the king of terror has a throne. His retinue 
of retainers are embraced in sewer gas, decaying vegetables, 
in neglected cellars, illy-ventilated rooms, decomposing garbage 
and with scores of other agencies supplying a hot-bed of dis- 
ease, swarming with remorseless instrumentalities of death. 
The feverish flush and pallor of consumption afford daily 
demonstration of the fierce and desperate conflict that is raging 
between life and death for the mastery. 
The black flag of the great and invincible conqueror is 
unfurled over an appalling legion of diseases, representing every 
phase and feature of human misery and suffering, constantly 
seeking a lodgment in the strong and robust man, as well as in the 
weak and helpless infant; and as the plainest laws of health are 
daily violated and constantly disregarded, diseases are invited 
to an easy victory. And how powerless are we, and how 
4 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
impotent are the resources of science and the greatest skill, 
when the half conscious patient feels that the great seals of 
life are broken, and discerns, by clairvoyant vision, the presence 
of the arch enemy of his race. 
Diseases march from continent to continent and from one 
hemisphere to another, marshalled in cohorts like the veteran 
legions of a Roman conqueror. 
The disease known as the black death emerged from the 
dark and pestilent jungles of Africa, bearing upon its death- 
dealing pinions the poisonous gases from the burning districts 
which border Egypt on the south, loaded with putrid emana- 
tions exhaled from the animal and vegetable substances decom- 
posed in the lakes formed by the retiring waters of the Nile 
and the cemeteries which its inundation reached. 
Sultry winds from the south carrying the condensed vapors 
and the poisonous gas of thousands of unburied human bodies, 
decomposing and putrefying in the blazing heat of the torrid 
sun in a panic-stricken and famine-cursed land, carried fearful 
mortality, not only in themselve, but by the universal destitu- 
tion which followed in their train. 
Death held high carnival; the jaws of the hideous monster 
grew weary in their work; the insatiate foe of human life 
revelled in the temple of aggregated woes, and held court in 
the dark pavilion of universal grief, and flooded his charnel 
craft by the tears of desolated homes. 
The black death advanced westward through continental 
Europe, spreading upon every hand calamitous destruction and 
general consternation, destroying in three years, during the 
middle of the fourteenth century, 25,000,000 inhabitants. Peo- 
ple fled in every direction, as from a drove of wild beasts. 
Nothing could arrest its march or obstruct its course. Every 
remedy was found useless, every means to save life proved 
abortive. A few hours of struggle, suffering, and resistance, 
and the mystery of mysteries was sullenly triumphant. 
It is not my intention or purpose to enter into a historical 
account of all of the well known scourges of the human race. 
It is well known that the Asiatic cholera, sometimes called the 
5 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
plague, in its epidemics, spreading over different parts of the 
globe from central Asia, swept millions of its victims to the 
grave. 
Yellow fever first made its appearance near Calcutta and 
the delta of the Ganges, passed westward to Bombay, thence to 
Mecca, upon the Red Sea. Next it broke out in Alexandria, 
passed up the Nile to Cairo, and searched in vain for victims 
amidst the solitudes and ruins of ancient Thebes. It crossed the 
Mediterranean Sea and lighted its baleful fires under the shad- 
ows of the crescent and the cross. From Constantinople it 
swept through the Grecian Archipelago and shrouded Athens 
with the trappings of universal grief. 
Such marked and striking visitations of the deadly enemy of 
mankind clearly demonstrate that those terrible scourges are 
borne as invisible and destructive agencies, by the wind and by 
the intercourse of commerce, so that seas, oceans, and wide 
stretches of country seem to offer no barrier to their errands of 
destruction. 
While scientists are busy with retort and alembic, in search 
of some antidote to kill the deadly poison, or to rout the disease 
from its stronghold, we are confronted with new forms, and 
fresh reinforcements to the mysterious ranks of our common 
enemy. 
Diphtheria, though known since the days of Hippocrates, was 
until recently but little understood, its contagiousness unrecog- 
nized, and preventive measures unknown, so that it spread in 
merciless triumph from France, in 1765, to every part of the 
civilized world, marking its path with mourning and its develop- 
ment by a terrible mortality. 
During the past few years influenza, in its wide-spread and 
aggravated form and modes of attack, is popularly regarded as 
a new disease, and heralded under the name of la grippe, which 
in its various phases and complications rivals any other single 
agency in its frightful mortality record. 
It would seem, in considering the fresh acquisitions to the 
black banner brigade, that the high standard of sanitary science 
is holding in check the ordinary modes of attack of many 
diseases. 
6 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
Our State Board of Health, in point of scientific acquirement, 
energy, zeal, and thoroughness of detail in its labors, stands 
second to none of its kind in this or any other country. Its 
regulations, requirements, and constant vigilance to maintain a 
high standard of sanitation, and to preserve the public health, 
have won plaudits and praise from every kindred board in the 
Republic and from those beyond the seas. 
But true science and conscientious discharge of duties, and 
general harmony throughout the profession in this State are 
impaired by the action of our legislature, in leaving open the 
floodgates of recruits and receiving from all sections of this and 
other countries the vampires and guerillas of vulgar and ingnor- 
ant quackery, who open gilded and tinseled offices in the midst 
of respectability, and commence a confidence game in the vicin- 
age of educated and scientific physicians. And not far behind 
that class of presumptuous and impudent mountebanks lurk the 
insane phantoms of attenuated dilutions, masquerading in the 
form and garb of a learned profession, which by some mysteri- 
ous and inscrutable jugglery of legislative legerdemain, suc- 
ceeded in having its ten-thousandth dilution transplanted into a 
statutory enactment by which it became the one-millionth part 
of a university. 
Such are some of the barriers to the advancement of exalted 
and thorough scientific knowledge, and zealous work in legiti- 
mate progressive medicine. The driftwood obstructs clear and 
rapid navigation. Some time, of course, is lost in brushing aside 
obstacles and explaining away the errors of ignorance, incul- 
cated by aliens to the profession, or, as the late celebrated 
Lowell put it, “ The colossal delusion of the nineteenth cen- 
tury.” 
There is another class of medical confidence men who open 
imposing offices, and placard the streets with the old, old trap- 
door device of “come into my parlor, says the spider to the fly.” 
The remainder means fleecing the credulous, and taking the last 
dollar of the unwary and the unsuspecting. Such places are 
called by their proprietors “ Dispensaries,” “ Surgical and Medi- 
cal Institutes,” and other high-sounding names; the object and 
aim being to assume a borrowed plumage of respectability, and 
carry on a swindling and disreputable business. 
7 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
The best directed efforts in sanitary science, with such for- 
midable and persistent obstructions, fall short of our best wishes 
and efforts, and the most effective instrumentalities seem to 
have lost in some degree their force and efficiency. With this 
digression I return to my theme. 
Viewing the foregoing, what is the scientific aspect of the tre- 
mendous energies concentrated in those morbific phenomena 
thus arrayed against the peace, happiness, and life of pleading 
and suffering mortality? What can we do to avert, in a meas- 
ure, the constant and envenomed encroachments of our mortal 
foe, armed with an arsenal of frightful weapons, threatening our 
health and life by constant menace, and holding in defiance all 
that science and skill can formulate or suggest ? Surely the sur- 
vey and contemplation of the annual mortality list justifies the 
poet’s idea that “ man was made to mourn.” But the enemies 
of life are not confined to organisms of the animal kingdom. 
Descending the scale of complexity of organization, but 
ascending the scale of longevity, I invite your attention to a hur- 
ried survey of the causes which lead to the death of the repre- 
sentative giants of the forests and the smaller things that flourish 
in their shade. 
The great spruce tree of San Marie del Thule, of Mexico, 
has attained a greater age, so far as scientific investigation has 
been made, than any tree on the globe. Its age is estimated to 
be 5,124 years, and, although struck with death, it still struggles 
for a continuance of life, in an unequal contest, and must soon be 
numbered among the dead. 
It has been the Mecca of scientists, scholars, and travelers 
for a century; it was visited by Humboldt, Professor Holden, 
the celebrated naturalist, by Taylor, and thousands of others. 
Extend, for a few moments, to that great tree consciousness, 
memory, and the power of vision, and the faculties of an intelli- 
gent spectator, and for a few minutes think what has transpired 
in the world’s history since its youth. 
It must have witnessed numberless changes in the earth’s 
surface; islands have come up from the bottom of the ocean, and 
earthquakes have sent down other islands to the lowest depths 
of the sea. 
8 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
Endowed with intelligence, the honored giant of the forest 
has beheld every step in the world’s history from its earliest 
dawn as the abode of man. 
It must have heard the rapturous echoes that delighted the 
heavenly host when the stars sang together, and the laughing 
music of the Euphrates, as its limpid waters warbled over the 
pebbles in the Garden of Eden, and saw the flash and gleams of 
the historic sword as it swayed back and forth before the grand 
entrance to the sacred bower. 
It must have beheld with wonder and amazement the archi- 
tects, masons, and plumbers looking over the ground for the 
pyramid, jabbering in Coptic monosyllables about the quality and 
supply of granite blocks on which the stupendous pile was to be 
reared, and what the means of transportation were from the 
great quarries of Sinai. 
Leaving the consultation about the pyramid for two thousand 
years, during the interval it was growing and expanding, and 
observing passing events, we come down to Solomon, whom 
it saw in all his glory and magnificence; and it was in full blossom 
when the Queen of Sheba visited the great King of Jerusalem. 
It witnessed the construction of the temple, the rise and fall 
of Damascus, the destruction of Tyre, and the ruin of Joppa. 
It saw the founding of Troy, the birth of Antioch, and heard the 
delicious music of Homer’s inspired verse, three thousand years 
That patriarch of the plain, which all men who have been for- 
tunate enough to see, gaze upon with mingled feelings of awe, 
admiration, and wonder, was a towering tree when Athens was 
founded, 1,500 years before the birth of Christ; it saw the des- 
truction of Troy, a thousand years before the Christian era; 
and it discerned the dazzling splendors of the star that guided 
the wise men of the east to the cradle of the Redeemer. 
It must have heard the shouts of the Roman soldiers under 
Titus, and the thunder of his engines of war before the walls of 
Jerusalem, and beheld the fulfillment of the prophecy in the 
destruction of the Holy City. 
That peerless and unrivaled monarch of the floral world, 
that king of kings and lord of lords of every forest and of all 
9 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
climes, standing alone in his glory, serene, undisturbed, and noble 
in his grandeur, almost crowding the bounds and limits of immor- 
tality in the length of his life, his great heart swelling with the 
garnered wisdom of fifty centuries, his overhanging and shadow- 
ing top shading and cheering millions of sad and weary hearts, 
still looks down upon the busy world, an ancient and voiceless 
chief, thick and radiant with the clustering memories of five 
thousand years; a living monument of historical events that 
dwarf all human conception, as its life antedates all records, and 
extends from the earliest dawn of tribal life to the grand achieve- 
ments and unrivalled splendors of the golden era, in the history 
of the world. 
Yet that proud and time-honored chief, which has braved 
the storms and vicissitudes and changes for thousands of years, 
must now surrender its laurels and lie down like the infant that 
prattles love, and smiles upon the mother’s knee. In the motion- 
less silence of death it obeys the summons of a universal law; it 
dips its flag to the great destroyer. 
Leaving the ancient and famous monument of unequaled 
vitality and miraculous longevity, with his laurel crowns thick 
around him, fading and growing dim in the gathering twilight 
of his age, we turn to a countless throng whose feeble and flick- 
ering lives, like the flash of a meteor, or the flame of a firefly, 
are mere transient evanescent sparks. 
They shoot up from the earth under the expanding and vital 
rays of solar heat and light, put forth their buds and leaves and 
flowers in ceaseless joy, ripen with a smile in abundant and 
priceless fruitage, and with that boundless and prodigal charity 
which is nature’s crowning glory, give all away and expire, 
looking and hoping for the annual resurrection which for six 
thousand years has not failed of its promise. 
The formative processes in the primordial state of tree and 
plant are exactly the same; the cell development in each are 
precisely alike. 
The ova of the lion and the mouse in their primitive condi- 
tion cannot be distinguished. The microscope shows no differ- 
ence whatever. All vegetable life originates by cells, and all 
forms of animal life commence their career by cell development, 
10 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
differing only in their shape and arrangement. Referring again 
to plants, and their structure—the allotted period of an annual 
plant is short, but its activities are indeed wonderful. Its vital 
currents rush through its trunk with quickening and electric 
energies, urging speedy and prompt action, every bud and 
leaflet, thrilling in every fibre with its mysterious force and 
power. 
The grain of wheat and the kernel of corn die, that they may 
fill the golden promise of renewed life; and herein we find a 
simple illustration of the Darwinian theory of the survival of the 
fittest, or natural selection. The plump grain of wheat, possess- 
ing more recuperative and latent power than the shrunken grain, 
Crowds it out, crushes its life, and overshadows its grave by its 
umbrageous development. 
The ear of corn shows many small kernels, which, in their 
growth, lacked the expansive power of their neighbors. 
The spurred rye is the actual evidence of blight. It is a sort 
of vegetable gangrene, and sinks to a lower scale and grade in 
the race of life, loses its power of reproduction, and is radically 
changed in its construction. 
The arrangement and the form of the cells in a century plant 
indicate a slow, sluggish, and patient growth. It requires no 
argument to prove that the developing force in this species of 
cactus, which stands at the head of a very numerous and respect- 
able family, and excels all of its relatives for longevity, is, in fact, 
the very lowest type of dormant energy in plants. Hence the 
cells, nutrient vessels, arrangement of fibres, the character of its 
sustenance, and the manner of assimilation, are widely different 
from the annual, the vital currents and energies of which afford 
a striking contrast in plant life. 
The circulation in the tree and plant life is not dissimilar to 
the circulating system in animals. The great venous sinuses 
convey the nutrition, rich in carbonaceous matter and aqueous 
materials, and hold in solution the various salts essential to the 
sustenance of plant or tree, while the leaves of either throw off 
the excess of carbon dioxide. Hence the carbonic acid elimin- 
ated, renders forests, or gardens of abundant vegetation, un- 
healthy resorts at night. 
11 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
The wonders of constitutional arrangement of some plants 
have excited scientists to patient and laborious investigation. 
The one most striking, to my mind, is the mimosa of the Lin- 
naean system, which flourishes on the banks of the Ganges, and 
is known as the sensitive plant. It has been asserted and main- 
tained, that the mimosa has a real nervous system, so remark- 
ably sensitive that it is capable of nervous excitement, and evinces 
a degree of sensation upon the slightest contact that still challen- 
ges the most rigid scrutiny into its ultimate constitution. 
The monads, which occupy a middle ground or neutral ter- 
ritory between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, reproduce 
themselves by segmentation, dividing and subdividing, with 
astonishing liberality and accuracy, for every part kicked off or 
thrown off enters upon an independent career, with the same 
feeble and lingering life. 
It presents a most remarkable and curious type of animated 
nature. The zoOphite is probably the very lowest form of ani- 
mal organization—simplest of all known in science. Its form 
and color are peculiarly coral; it performs the function of diges- 
tion and respiration in the same organ; its position is that of a 
plant, and has that appearance; but all animal traits and charac- 
teristics are completely lost in the dim and mysterious encroach- 
ments of the vegetable kingdom, in the formation of coral reefs, 
which are the monumental tombs silently built under the waves 
of the sea, by living and busy organisms, to commemorate the 
universal law of death, manifested in the lowest as well as the 
highest forms of life. 
Nothing can escape or evade it; there is no rescue and no 
appeal; the transformation is the fiat of the Almighty. 
All of those beautiful plants, as well as the mighty spruce 
tree, are under the ban of the far-reaching and universal decree. 
Every plant is a martyr to parasitical ravages; every tree is sur- 
rounded by vigilant and active foes. 
Having hastily reviewed the most prominent and conspicu- 
ous causes of the devastating and fatal epidemics generated by 
the putrefactive processes going on in the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms, and the awful train of evils that throng their path- 
way, let us now take a brief survey of the tribal hosts, and the 
12 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
countless millions of industrious and meddlesome insects, which 
swarm in clouds, like the locust of Egypt, levying black-mail 
upon the district of their invasion, and destroying in their ener- 
getic march through states, empires, and principalities, every 
living leaf and bud of plant and shrub. 
The “ army worm ” in legions, beyond all belief or computa- 
tion, sweeps over a field of green and blooming cotton like the 
angel of death. Not a leaf, a bud, or a blossom can be found. 
It literally devours every leaf and strips the stalk, as completely 
and as thoroughly as if the work had been done by-human 
hands, or by a consuming flame of fire. 
To witness such a visitation one would think that the surface 
of the earth was given the power of locomotion—was actually 
changing its base, en masse, to a more congenial climate, so 
densely and so perfectly do the malicious parasites cover the 
ground. 
They come up, like Jonah’s gourd, in a single night, in mul- 
titudes and numbers beyond all human conception, and they 
move apparently under the orders of a veteran leader, in solid 
columns and at double quick, to the field of active hostility; and 
when the devastation is complete they vanish like an apparition, 
and no one can tell their abiding place. 
You can witness a field absolutely alive with them to-day, 
swaying under a gentle breeze like a field of wheat, and to-mor- 
row at dawn not one will appear at roll-call. 
The Colorado beetle, known as the potato-bug, is a compar- 
atively new importation from the universal arsenal of invading 
enemies; and, although a recent acquisition, it has proved a 
scourge of the most destructive character. The extent of its 
ravages are not generally understood, but the losses sustained, 
and the damage incurred by farmers, run up to millions upon 
millions of dollars; and this terrible guerrilla of the insect family 
has already crossed the Atlantic, and has spread consternation 
and dismay from Land’s End to the Danube in its frightful inva- 
sion, and the ruin of the poor man’s sustaining hope. 
The phylloxera, a small and wiry worm, recently appeared 
in France, attacked the richest vineyards in such vast numbers? 
and with such destructive results to the grapevines, that the 
13 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
whole business was really suspended. The loss entailed in 
France aroused Germany and Italy, and Professor Pasteur 
visited Italy at the request of the government, and by patient 
and long-continued and ceaseless observation, he discovered the 
habits and character of the pest, and then the great scientist 
first achieved his fame; for his plan and treatment were adop- 
ted and fully vindicated the accuracy of his observations by the 
extermination of the marauder. 
He clearly described the habits and manner of generation of 
the worms, and suggested the remedy for their destruction; and 
the Academy of France, in recognition of his distinguished ser- 
vices in the same line of scientific investigation, voted him the 
highest honors within its gift, while the government awarded 
him a large sum of money for his unrivaled and remarkable 
services to his country and mankind. 
Thus one may follow up this line of enquiry throughout the 
entire field that is open and inviting, but the labor is immense, 
the time is precious, and science is rigid and exacting in such 
details as are demanded in looking up the history, habits and 
general outline and characteristics of the thousands upon thou- 
sands of insect tribes, whose busy life is employed in plotting 
against the life, peace, happiness, and well-being of the strug- 
gling and powerless trees, plants, and shrubs, designed for man’s 
physical and intellectual enjoyment and comfort. 
From the ephemeral plant and flowering shrub and cluster- 
ing vine, they attack with admirable and daring energy all 
classes and kinds of fruit trees. The peach, the plum and 
cherry trees, in their peaceful rest and useful sphere, feel the 
gnawing of the vile worm at their hearts and have felt the 
venom of its sting in bud and fruit and vital part. 
The lofty and imperial oak is assured of its strength and 
position among the great trees of the forest, but like the assassin 
that robs a republic of its president, the ceaseless borer may rob 
the forest of its sovereign. In our beloved State the beautiful 
forests of pine, of priceless value, which have been the source of 
millions upon millions of wealth, have not escaped the ravages of 
the tireless borer. Put your ear to the trunk of a lofty pine and 
you distinctly hear the ceaseless sound of its invaders steadily 
14 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
advancing to the heart of the tree. From the living oak and 
pine, contending with storms and tempest and tireless foes, to the 
ship’s hull the eager vigilance and unremitting energies of the 
boring hosts pursue their work of ruin. So universal has been 
their united onset that copper plating was resorted to, to save 
many a noble vessel from wreck and destruction. It seems 
almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that in three years 
the boring hordes in countless multitudes will completely honey- 
comb a ship’s bottom and send the vessel to the bottom of the 
ocean to find a tombstone beside a coral reef, if the danger 
were not discovered and averted. 
The orange tree, the solemn and stately palm, the coffee 
shrub and the tea plant of the tropics, the oak and the pine of 
the temperate zone, the lichen of the polar circle and the algae 
of the sea stand in constant dread of swarming enemies. 
I know of nothing in the wide domain of life that is exempt 
from visible or invisible foes which are perpetually and fiercely 
attacking at all vulnerable points. 
Human life is the target and repository of countless millions 
of disease-producing germs, unseen, invisible, and only brought 
to our knowledge by microscopic vision. They elude ordinary 
research and observation, but the fact that they generate diseases 
is as well established as is the law of gravitation. 
We have considered briefly the ordinary agencies arrayed 
against mankind, and glanced at the universality of the fact that 
all vegetable life, in whatever form it exists, is pursued by a 
horde of enemies seeking its destruction. 
Having alluded to the germ in its multitudinous varieties and 
forms, as ever present and always armed and equipped as the 
unsparing and merciless antagonist of mankind, now let us re- 
view some of the natural causes which have, from the earliest 
history of the world, contributed largely to the destruction of 
human life. 
These natural events which have semi-occasionally saluted 
the inhabitants of earth were called by Clarence King, “ catas- 
trophic outbursts of indignant nature.” We will only recall a 
few of them. 
Among the natural phenomena to which I have alluded as 
15 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
having performed prodigies of destruction in the course of 
human history, that form manifested as earthquakes stands pre- 
eminent. They have more frequently in the past than in the 
present really convulsed whole continents, and have extended 
their mighty energies in tremendous impulses throughout the 
entire hemisphere. 
In A. D. 835, the city of Kaifong was utterly destroyed, with 
a loss of 200,000 lives. The earth opened as a vast and yawn- 
ing gulf, into which the entire city was swallowed. Not a rem- 
nant, or apparently a fragment, escaped the awful chasm. 
Antioch was destroyed in the 5th century and 80,000 of its 
inhabitants were lost. Lisbon, in Portugal, was nearly destroyed 
in 1755 by a terrific earthquake, and 75,000 people were suddenly 
precipitated into a dark and fathomless gulf, from which dense 
volumes of smoke and stifling vapors arose. The shock was 
felt all over Spain, France, Germany and Africa. Only a few 
moments are necessary, with such forces, to destroy a city or to 
ruin an empire. 
Earthquakes have done more to change the contour of the 
globe than any other single agency. 
In 1822, 100,000 square miles of territory in Chili were 
raised permanently six feet above the former level. By another 
earthquake that occurred in 1819, the Ullah Bund, in the Indies, 
a tract of land 50 miles long and 20 miles wide, was elevated 
ten feet, changing the whole features of the country. 
In 1743, the city of Guatemala, Mexico, containing about 
25,000 people, was instantly precipitated into a wide and bottom- 
less gulf, removing from human vision every vestige of the city. 
The spot where the city stood is now occupied by a dark, dead, 
loathsome lake, in which not an insect nor any living thing can 
be found. 
When the earth commenced its revolutions around the sun, 
it was not the abode of life. It has continued the gradual pro- 
cess of cooling and contracting in size ever since it was launched 
upon its independent career, and the stupendous and awful con- 
vulsions evidently derive their expansive powers and energies 
from the interior and have marked the earth’s crust and features 
in a wonderful degree by changing the beds of rivers, the shores 
16 PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
of lakes, and the ocean’s coast; in the upheaval of mountains, the 
depression of plains, forming lakes and estuaries and raising the 
great mountain ranges by an outburst of giant forces that excels 
in power all human comprehension. 
The foot-prints of volcanic action extend throughout the 
entire Rocky Mountain range, through Mexico and the Andes 
to Patagonia. 
In 1759, in Malpais, Mexico, from June till August, there 
were constant deep, rumbling, and portentous sounds, traversing 
a wide extent of country, attended with trembling shocks and 
vibratory motions of more or less severity, which continued 
till late in August, when in the middle of the night immense 
flames of fire burst forth from the earth, reaching far up in the 
air and lighting up a whole province, from which the inhabitants, 
believing the whole world to be on fire, fled terror-stricken in 
wild and mad disorder. Huge rocks were thrown into the air 
2,000 feet and hurled to great distances, attended by loud and 
prolonged explosions. Six volcanic cones were formed on that 
level plain, one of which is 1,600 feet high. 
In 1819 a tremendous eruption took place from several of 
those cones, covering the country with ashes several feet deep, 
and 150 miles from the cones ashes fell six inches deep. 
In a. d. 79 the city of Pompeii, Italy, was literally buried 
beneath a sea of ashes to the depth of 50 to 150 feet. Theatres, 
temples, palaces, shops and council chambers, with the inhabi- 
tants of the entire city, were entombed for 1,700 years in the pro- 
found silence of death. The ruins were accidentally discovered 
by some peasants digging near the river Sarno, which gave the 
antiquarian a rich and wonderful field for scientific research. 
When the superincumbent ashes were removed, the houses 
cleaned, offices swept out, and exchanges freed from the suffo- 
cating accumulations, a most astonishing spectacle was pre- 
sented. The dead were found in exactly the same positions 
they were in when the awful avalanche and flood of ashes and 
smoke shut out the light of the sun. 
Men were found in their counting rooms in the act of count- 
ing money and paying it out, scribes were found with pen in 
hand, with parchment before them, drawing contracts; clerks 
17 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. _ 
engaged in making up accounts, artisans in their shops, artists 
in their studios. Women were found with all the articles in a 
well appointed boudoir engaged in adorning themselves, while 
the servants were found in various apartments in the act of 
attending to household duties. Others were found in the 
streets, evidently trying to escape by flight. Poor little loving 
children were found in beds, side by side, sleeping the sleep 
that knows no waking. The scene viewed 1,700 years after the 
fatal eruption has moved the stoutest hearts. 
In the full meridian glow and vigor of life, in the quiet, 
happy, and charming domestic circle, with loving hearts, with 
bright promises of prosperous days, that entire city with its 
teeming thousands, basking in the golden radiance of t sunny 
Italy, was suddenly called to the silent and solemn banquet of 
death. 
The pulsating throb of the fiery heart of Vesuvius, shaking 
and tremulous with pent-up flame, sent forth, belching from its 
horrid mouth, a very deluge of death that rolled in mountain 
waves and ashen clouds over the doomed and ill-fated city. 
The heavens were curtained in black. The very elements 
must have been hushed in awe, and death itself must have hesi- 
tated in view of the awful sacrifice, while the terrible outburst 
of destructive wrath buried the city from the sight of man.. 
We still have a number of active volcanoes serving as safety 
valves throughout the earth, with occasional feeble shocks and 
suspicious vibrations—like the one which occurred in California 
last month—as great apostles of nature’s restrained and bridled 
forces to remind us that beneath our feet astounding powers 
and forces are held in reserve, ample in potential energy to bury 
a hundred cities in a moment of time. 
The earth has not ceased to contract, [nor has the cooling 
process ended. When these changing conditions have reached 
a climax, and are no longer expressions of the great forces that 
have been in active operation for millions of years, this grand 
and stately globe will cease to be the abode of man. It will be 
a cold, cheerless, dreary, exhausted and worn-out mass of matter, 
unable to support a living thing. It will be a vast cemetery, a 
world of cenotaphs, of crumbling tombstones, of wrecked monu- 
ments and forgotten mausoleums. 
18 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
As I stated at the commencement of this paper, death is a 
universal law; and as the law of gravitation pervades every 
form of matter, the realms of the grim messenger are without 
limit. There is no exception and no evasion and no Elysium in 
the boundless universe free from its visitation. 
Death is the primal law of all created matter, and while lon- 
gevity has a wide range, from millions of years down to the 
insect of a day, worlds cannot evade the far-reaching and eternal 
decree. Everything that commences in time must end in time. 
The time is coming when this beautiful world, with all of its 
lovely cities, its kingdoms and empires and all that exists upon 
this sphere, shall be hushed in the perpetual silence of death. 
The cord of life will have vibrated for the last time, and thrilled 
the earth with its flickering and waning impulses. The gigantic 
energies of the central mass, in billows of fire, which have aided 
in warming the globe for countless centuries and vitalized its 
crust with heat, will have expended their force, lost their expan- 
sive power, and felt the steady encroachments of the dreaded 
monarch of this vast cemetery. 
This is no pessimistic theory, or dream of moody minds; nor 
is it the fanciful metaphor of inflated rhetoric. It is the unalter- 
able and inflexible decree from the source and throne of power, 
that no form of organic life, or inorganic matter, shall endure 
forever. Everything must submit to final tran nmation. 
Having briefly and hurriedly surveyed a subject which has 
afforded me much thought, I must, in conclusion, devote a few 
minutes to our chosen field of labor. 
In leaving this subject I must add that I should like to have 
pursued it to a logical conclusion. If time permitted, and my 
courage would sustain me to grapple with so great a theme, I 
fain would carry you in thought to the solar system, and to a 
more minute investigation of the laws of gravitation and the laws 
of motion, as applied to planetary worlds; but I forbear, and 
again return to the profession which we all so love, venerate, and 
adore; for I most devoutly and sincerely think that no vocation, 
calling, or pursuit contributes so much to alleviate the distress 
and suffering of our race, as the time-honored and regular pro- 
fession of which we are members. 
19 STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
It stands in the front rank, and overshadows all feeble imi- 
tators, and has numbered among its members the most distin- 
guished scholars, the most renowned scientists and pioneers in 
philanthropy that the world has ever known in its history. 
Its high standing in all civilized countries is a sure mark of 
its inherent vitality. It was related of Von Graffe, when sum- 
moned to the palace of one of the crowned heads of Europe, 
that he declined to spare the time to go and required the royal 
patient to visit him. When Sir Morrell Mackenzie was sum- 
moned to Germany to attend the Emperor, it demonstrated the 
fact that kings and royal retinue were compelled to bow to 
science. The doctor was the king and Frederick the sub- 
ject. When Sir Astley Cooper opened with his scalpel the 
dropsical limb of George III, it was the king who was honored, 
and not the surgeon. No patient, peasant or president, million- 
aire or medicant, confers any honor upon the conscientious and 
educated physician or surgeon who follows his profession as a 
gentleman, and his high calling with exalted and philanthropic 
impulses. His fame and reputation are acquired by undisguised 
merit, and by an intelligent and thoroughly scientific discharge 
of the duties devolving upon him. He neither seeks, nor would 
he accept, the meretricious and delusive aids resorted to by 
folly, but by self-sacrifice, zealous devotion, and untiring indus- 
try in his profession he wins the confidence, respect and admira- 
tion of his fellow-men. 
It is especially true that in our profession, knowledge is 
power. He who feels the great responsibility of his calling 
views human fife with a supreme and tender sympathy, and has 
a constant solicitude for those whose lives and health are con- 
fided to his care. The constant tendency, in our practice, is to 
elevate and refine the best attributes of human nature, which are 
touched by the sorrows and afflictions that come to every home. 
And the medical profession has always been the irrepressible 
and persistent champion of sanitary science, and as a conse- 
quence, the promoter and preserver of the public health. 
There is more self-sacrifice and ceaseless toil in the line of 
medical practice, more devotion to the public weal, and less of 
idle hours and social enjoyments than in any other profession. 
20 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
But we have our compensation in the thought and conviction of 
duties earnestly and conscientiously performed; that we have 
not turned a deaf ear to the appealing cry of the destitute and 
penniless; for if ever a human being hears the soothing and gen- 
tle melody of a whispering angel, or feels the warm breath-like 
incense rising from a grateful heart, it is when he is relieving a 
fellow creature of suffering and sorrow; when he has removed a 
bitter and keen agony, filled the tear-laden breast with sunshine 
and gratitude, given the afflicted one visions of coming joys, 
and thrilled his mind with emotions of happiness. 
At that moment his best and highest aspirations and his 
noblest thoughts are in friendly communion with all that is lofty, 
beautiful, and pure in the human soul. 
21