ADDRESS or MONTGOMERY JOHNS, M. D„ DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE ©twtifjftJj Jitfjwal €omt of ffoditwo OF TIIE JAEDICAL pEPARTMENT pOLLEGE, OCTOBER 1, 1868. WASHINGTON: PRINTED BY CUNNINGHAM & McINTOSII. 1868. Washington, October 3,1H, Messrs. Rich, St. Clair, and Eckhabdt. A. D D FI E S 8. Ladies and Gentlemen, Students of the Medical Class of 1868-’(59, Corporate Authorities of George- town College, and my Professional Brothers in the Science and Art of Medicine: This evening the pleasant duty has been devolved upon me, by my as- sociates in this medical school, of welcoming you to this hall and of con- gratulating you and the good citizens of the National Metropolis upon this reconsecration of this goodly edifice to the sacred cause of medical educa- tion. The establishment and successful inauguration of any school of learning in the midst of a vast city is an event calling for public congratu- lation, and well worthy of civic demonstration such as smiles upon our efforts this evening. The rise and growth of mere academic, legal, theo- logical, or scientific academies, though these may be subjects of public congratulation, are, in municipal importance, events of much inferior value and significance, when compared with the establishment or further devel- opment of a school devoted to medicine as an art and as a science. In the train of every well-conducted medical college spring up general and special hospitals and dispensaries, well-filled medical libraries and museums, wiser and more efficient plans for public hygiene, professional emulation among practicing physicians, really vital medical societies, and in and out of our profession a higher tone of professional sentiment, thought, language, and conduct; in a word, an esprit du corps in a body vitally aggregated around a living, working, thinking, scientific centre. Paris, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin are now in the present, as they have been in the past, the vital centres of British and Continental medical learning. Every rich man, as well as every poor man, in a community in whose midst arise any vast college and hospital, has a personal interest in the learning, the skill, the zeal, and the personal honor of each member of its teaching and practicing'medical and surgical officers. Here are tested publicly the pretensions of those who claim to be competent to teach the science, and practice the art to which physicians and surgeons profess to devote their lives, their energies, and their very selves, in solemn conse- cration to the welfare of suffering man. One hundred years ago a worthy merchant of London, while a director of St. Thomas Hospital, administered a merited, bold, but brave and noble 4 rebuke to a physician of no less eminence than the celebrated Akenside. It had come to the director’s ears that the doctor was brusque and even rude to the poor patients committed to his care in the charity wards, and that on a recent occasion he had even excelled himself in want of forbear- ance and kindness tow ard this class of his daily patients. “ Doctor,” said the plain-speaking merchant, “you are only the servant of a noble public charity, where you are temporarily performing duties for us, the directors. These sick poor have a right to uniform and polite attendance from every physician whom we hire to attend them, as much as from the nurses who are paid to carry out your orders; they and you are equally our servants in this humane service toward our suth-ring fellows.” Noble w’ords, these, and worthy to he engraven upon the heart of every physician as he ministers among the indigent sick, whether in the alleys of vast cities, in the humble cottages of rural communities, or In the crowded wards of celebrated hospitals. In your student days, then, my young friends, you have a right to expect that your medical teachers in the lec- ture room and in the hospital ward, as well as in their private associations with you as tutor and pupil, shall ever exhibit that kind politeness and polite kindness which hardly any dares overlook in the splendid homes of the wealthy sick, but which is sometimes forgotten by humbler bedsides of suffering and afflicted men. Man ought to be, said Celsus, most like the Gods when dispensing health among men ; as w’e teach, my brother pro- fessors in the Medical Department of Georgetown College, quite as much by our dress and manners, our style of thought and expression, as by our formal utterances, ex cathedra. Whatever changes distinguish the medical student of to-day from his predecessor of the times of Vesalius, Cheselden, Part, John and William Hunter, times when physicians were often brusque, overbearing, coarse, and ill-grained, and yet rose to distinguished eminence in spite of these social vices, the causes of these changes in the student may be found in changes which the advance of refinement has wrought in ourselves, their teachers. A rapid glance, then, at the past status of physicians in the old world will enable us to detect readily these causes, to depict the medical student of the time of Charles I, to sketch his successor of to-day, and to anticipate some of the lineuinents of the medical student of the close of the present century; when our labors and those of our junior cotemi>ornries being ended, you, young men, then rich in wisdom and ex|>erience, shall take our places and more perfectly perform the duties we endeavor to discharge. The sister arts of surgery and medicine hav-- advanced almost step by step with every advance in the art and science of war. Military hygiene was created by the conditions which arise amid great armies. Civil hygiene rose to importance in the vast cities of imperial Home and medieval Kuroja: only when conquest, immigration, and commerce brought into being vast military or trading communities. The invention of gunpowder and the bayonet in earlier days, and more modern developments of military science in weapons for attack or methods of defence, have created new conditions for medical seience and new requirements for medical art. 5 The opening lines of the immortal Iliad depict the ravages of pestilence in a mighty army ; as Chapman renders them : “ Wliat time Achiles’ baneful wrath imposed Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loosed From breasts heroic; sent them far to that invisible cave Which no lis?ht comforts, and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave ; When Apollo, fired against the king of men for contumely shown his priest, in- fectious sickness sent To plague the army, and to death by hosts the soldiers went. Like the night he ranged the host, with his hard loosen’d hand, His silver bow oft twang’d. His arrows did first the mules destroy, and swift hounds, then the Greeks them- selves his deadly arrows shot; The fires of death never went out; nine days his shafts flew hot About the army.”—Iliad, Book I. Or, as modern science would express it, the malarial fevers which deci- mate camps badly located and badly cleansed. Here the military surgeon of old, the associate and equal of his brother warriors, learned the fearful nature of hemorrhage, the painful and often fatal tendency of fractures, punctures, and concussions, while the physician pondered upon the cause, symptoms, and march of fevers, and learned to estimate excessive mental and bodily fatigue, anxiety, and watchings, defeat, new and illy-prepared food and drink, as more fatal than the glittering sword or the shining spear. The splendid conquests of Alexander of Macedon, brought new appe- tites, new dresses, new vices, and new diseases into civilized Europe. But they also brought to the study of Aristotle new plants and new mineral substances wherewith to combat disease. For fully an entire century medical art was developed in two directions solely, viz: in the study of these new drugs and their application to disease. This period is marked by a host of able writers upon medical botany, pharmacy, and symptomatology, the splendid beginnings which culminated with the schol- ars of the Library and Museum, of Alexandria, B. C. 300. Although by this period medicine had become fully divorced from the sacerdotal offices of the Greek and Roman priesthood, and tended to be- come, up to the era of the pious Galen, A. D. 131, almost an atheistical science, the medical student of the anti-galenical period was little more than an expert botanist and mineralogist, and carefully-taught symptomat- ologist, skillful in the use of a few efficient but clumsily-fashioned surgical instruments ; a most careful follower of the empiracism of Hypocrates, hut knowing nothing of chemistry or pathology, and next to nothing of human anatomy and physiology. Chemistry and pathology were as yet uncreated sciences; and religion forbade vivisection and the repulsive pursuits of human dissection. The medical teachers of this early day were necessarily dogmatist They taught and required their students not only to swear “ in verba magistri but to repeat their own procedures in medical and surgical cases, and to transmit from age to age a venerable but almost useless moles of medical doctrine ; whose contradictions and ill-founded pretension were carefully 6 concealed by its peculiar and abstruse technical phraseology. This age had no great hospitals. In divorcing medicine and the priesthood, the temples of A|h)11o, Hygeia, and Hippocrates no longer afforded to the youthful physician the clinical histories and observations of a former period; but still medical men were not illy educated, even though they knew but little of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and pathology. They were usually mature men before commencing medical study. The gym- nasium had given them physical courage and endurance; the drama and national games had refined and disciplined their (esthetic tastes. In his- tory, politics, poetry, ethics, logic, and geometry they were most carefully taught by the oral teachings anti disquisitions of eminent teachers. They brought well-disciplined intellects, refined tastes, and good judgments to their professional studies. They had enjoyed intimate association for several years with men of superior acquirements; and association with such men is in itself almost an education. That such agencies produced a Galen, A D. till, a Celsus in the era of Tiberius can create in us no surprise. The practice of medicine was in the hands of a highly educated class. It re- quired superior wealth or peetdiar energy and talent for its study. It pre- supposed not only thorough preliminary academic training, but required costly travel and tuition fees for its completion. The conventional dress and demeanor of a physician or surgeon in the time of Augustus bespoke good taste, personal dignity, and a liberal style of domestic expenditure. The writers cotem|M>rary with Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus speak in terms of honest admiration of the character and pursuits of cotemporary physicians. Both teachers and students were educated, refined and earnest men. Their intercourse was based upon mutual courtesy ; and their social standing was honorable and lil>cral. In the dismemberment of the Homan Empire, A. I). :175, and the irrup- tion of northern nations upon the circum maritime States of Southern Europe, medical education presents no especial progress until the estab- lishment of Moorish civilization, A. I). 711, in Southern Spain. The naturism of Hipocrates was now revived in its influence U|H>n Euroj>ean medicine in a new and even more practical method than in the hands of Greek, Alexandrine, or Roman teachers. The schools of Granada, Cor- dova, and Seville, taught by eminent Moorish and Arabic teachers, (a flex- ible, logical, expressive, and metaphysical language l>eing the vehicle of communication,) became a new vital centre of medical opinion. The Arabian philosophers were lilx'ral, without atheism, naturists ; nlthough eminent in logic and metaphysics. They possessed accurate translations of Hippocrates, Theophrastus, and Dioscorides. ('hemistry was a nascent science; mercury, iron, arsenic, and alcohol had enriched their pharma- copia ; their religion enforced chastity and |>ersonal temperance ; war had familiarized them with |>ost mortem dissection ami its necessity in medical investigation; osteology and myology were fully understood and taught; taxidermy, by means of spices, alcohol, syrups, and turpentines, afforded the means of preserving morbid specimens; the peculiar skin diseases which invaded Europe, wherever Christian was brought into contact with 7 Mahommedan peoples; the simultaneous appearauce of wide-spread febrile epidemics—these and other causes, eloquently summed up by Draper in his History of Modern Civilization, tended to give special importance to the great Moorish schools of Southern Europe, to dignify the language of the infidel, and to impart new zest to medical study as pursued in their vast schools. Avicenna, Averroes, and the great lights of this period have added dignity to human history by their observations, their writings, their philosophies, and their influence upon European civilization in the tenth century. It was no small gain that they taught in their own vernac- ular, Arabic tongue. Poetry and fable had already demonstrated its fit- ness as a medium of elegant thought, and the metaphysical writers early succeeding Mahomet had tested to the utmost its capacity in dialectic dis- quisition. The Moors were nationally brave, clear-witted, reflective, fond of phy- sical observations, and the conservators of two sciences just springing into being, viz : chemistry and physical philosophy. What manner of students thronged around such teachers ? Like pupil, like teacher; medicine ceased to rest upon authority, and was refounded upon observation. To master the oriental dialect demanded time, and produced mental discipline. Stu- dents, i. e., men who had really studied, lectured to students, i. e., men who were earnestly engaged in study, and the result was what it always must be, advanced intellectual culture. Their observations upon the phys- ical and medical properties of drugs were accurate and extensive; their notions of anatomy and surgery, simple but clear, and well derived from dissection and clinical experience ; their chemistry and physics made a beginning in physiology and pathology now possible, De Sacy tells us, Arabic grammar is the most philosophical product of the human intellect. A no mean precursor, then, to your studies, gentlemen, were you twelve hundred years ago pursuing your medical education at Granada or Cordova, listening to Avicenna in his mother tongue, the soft air of Granada bring- ing to your ear words equally as beautiful and expressive as the language of Homer and Aristotle. Up to the invention of printing, A. D. 1436, 1462, and 1474, of the method of mezzotinting, and cheap copper engraving, the methods of medical edu- cation remained unchanged. Spain and Italy were, and continued to be, the great foci of intellectual culture. Thither wended his way the Irish, Scotch, English, German, and French student, after years of preliminary study in mathematics, and the classical languages; to listen to lecturers read in the Arabic or Latin tongues—languages whose acquisition had cost the student years of toil and well-filled purses of gold The protracted conflict between France and England, and then between Spain and England, the wars of the low countries, produced home schools in France, Great Britain, and Holland; hospitals were created by the needs of vast armies and long campaigns. The rise of an almost new dis- ease about the time of the siege of Naples, A. D. 1494 ; the new and altered character of injuries inflicted upon the battle-field ; the now ascertained value of mercury, iron, and hark; the successful pursuits of the chemists 8 and physicists ortant modern observations to state, and ancient notions to refute and disprove— the Greeks, Romans, and Arabians are all wrong, say they; and we mod- erns of 1000, with the light of new sciences, must build anew the temple of medical learning. Though printing had made hook* more numerous, and engraving had added to their utility as hand books, folios and quarto* were unconscionably costly even yet, and the lx*st part of instruction w’as necessarily oral. If lectures were less didactic they were, sad to say, more unfortunately polemic and controversial. Indeed, the professional Bil- lingsgate enbalmcd in the Latin folios of the Vesulian era is one of the most marked characteristics of the literature of the time ; but for ull it was the palmy period of anatomical study and discovery. Then there were muscles unnamed to receive the names of the describcr, and ligaments and sinuses, and valves, and canals, and ducts and glands, to hand down the names of Poupart, and Morgagni, and Valsalva, and Harris, and Whar- ton, as well as the line of g«*ographieal discovery, lands and buys to tempt the adventurous navigator toward climes unknown. Surgery demanded minute dissection ; chemistry and physics made these possible, and anatomy en grande and en petite, descriptive nnd microscopic, were toiled u|iou most successfully. On the other hand, in our day, and in our continent, but one discoverer has rediscovered (in 1824) a previously-described muscle and thereto af- fixed his name. As a cotemporary poet narrates the discovery— “ The great Processor llorner, At the orbit’* inner corner Of a hulf-<]lH.«eo-teoint work of Belgium and Italy, are brightly mingled in the va- ried costumes before us. The small sword seems universally worn, save by the ecclesiatics, who are scattered through the throng, noble-hearted men who are fitting themselves to minister to the bodies as well as souls of Pagans in the newly-discovered realms. All eyes are intent uj>on the anatomical table, when Master Andreas enters, with MS. in one hand and scalpel in the other. He is a goodly man, fully six feet in height, and pro- portionately built; his elegant doublet of velvet and fine fur only partially concealed by the academic gown which hangs loosely over his shoulders ; his limbs, exposed from the knee down to the foot by his tightly-fitting silken stockings, are a worthy study for the painter; his slashed and loo|>ed pantaloons; his elegantly-made buckles and shoes; the richly-jeweled sword, and massive ring worn ujkju the thumb of the left hand ; the costly jmint laced collar, illy concealed by his full reddish and curly beard, which divides in two points over his broad chest; the figure, l»earing, dress, and adornments of the man bespeak rather the warrior and courtier than the student and teacher. At exact noon every student is seated, books and pens in readiness. The master reads slowly but distinctly a description of his dissection, expressed in correct and well-s|>oken rnedhcval Latin. He adheres closely to his manuscript, only to glance toward Father An- toine, his translator, amanuensis, and comj>oier, whose latinity secures correctness and even elegance in the daily prelections, when a word or a letter is difficult to decipher. From time to time a gentleman of the court comes in and moves courteously and quietly toward the reader, and soon the blue-eyed and fair-haired Emperor and his military officers. Every eye is fixed upon the lifeless dissection ; every ear drinks in the clearly- uttered Latin description. Titian scans the varied and brilliant assem- bly and treasures up groups and postures for a future canvass. The hour has expired; the assembly breaks up into chatting groups; the Emperor approaches the table, examines the arteries above the elbow, and speaking partly to the teacher and partly to a group of students gathered near, says: “ Well, Master Andrew, if our scurvy chirurgeons in the low countries had thy wit or thy skill we would not have buried so many brave men before Antwerp; truly thy sagacious knife and silken cord were sorely needed 11 by my brave Spanish men.” “Sire,” replied Vesalius, “were all sover- eigns as liberal toward our art and mystery as is my noble Emperor, Span- ish soldiers would not fear the knife of the Dutch doctor more than they dread Holland swords or pikes. Burgius knoweth no anatomy ; how, then, can their leeches be skillful among wounds. He hath not read my Ana- tomia Vera ; yet ventureth to call me a Spanish magpie, who stealeth jew- els from Galen and the ancients—pardon my wrath, sire, but I loathe all lowcountrymen and heretics, be they soldiers or civilians; they are scurvy dogs before a Castilian gentleman.” A murmur of applause goes around the hall; the royal party moves slowly away ; and the King and Master Andrew are alone. Shortly Vesalius was sent as a private agent to the Low Countries, al- though ostensibly only to hold a disputation with Burgius, and the diplo- macy of years turned upon the confidences of that hour. The main figures in this sketch are from nature, and only the coloring and accessories are fictitious. The artist has preserved the remembrance of the occasion in the fine portrait of the anatomist which adorns his Ana- tomia Vera, representing Vesalius demonstrating an arm to the Emperor. We have now traced the progress of medical education from the period of Hippocrates to an era essentially modern. From the beginning of the sixteenth century up to the time of Jenner (1789) the methods of profes- sional education were almost unchanged. In turn, the universities of Turin, Paris, Madrid, Padua, Leyden, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Dublin became the favorite homes of professional learning. The successive im- provements in printing and engraving made books cheaper, less cumberous, and more available- The celebrated museums of Morgagni, Valsalva, Hunter, and S. Everard Home, the osteological collections of Cambridge and Paris, were almost simultaneously collected, and did much to facili- tate instruction. The redemonstration (1092) by Harvey of the circulation of the blood, the chemical investigations of Black and Rumford and Scudamore (1790) gave a new impetus to physiology and Pathology, and were reflected in the theoretical writings of Brown, Cullen, and Boussais, no less than in the special treatises of Haller. In England the Protectorate of Cromwell, and in France the reign of the Democratic Republic, were marked by a lowering in the tone of social intercourse in all classes of society, and nowhere more markedly than in the medical profession. The period of the second Charles restored for awhile the courtesy of so- cial life in England; but with the Hanovrian Georges vulgarity, coarse- ness, and pretention took the place of the genial refinement of the days of Sir Philip Sidney. The roughness of John Hunter, and the well-known brusqueness of Abernethy, were reproduced in the roystering and blus- tering medical student of Edinburgh and Dublin, at the commencement of the present century. This was, however, only the analogue of the fresh- mansliip of American colleges and the club life of the German University. A conventional disregard of the proprieties of language, dress, and mann r 12 tolerated at one period of studentship, to be laid aside forever when the real business of life was begun. It was fortunate that in England court physicians were usually intrusted with their leading metropolitan hospitals. Their eminent social position and refined bearing did much to repress a growing tendency to lay aside the conventional dignity of your brethren in the days of Sir Hans Sloan and the elegant Lettsome. The cotempo- raries of Rush, Physic, and Nuthan Smith, the elder, in our own country, retained a courtliness of bearing and elegance of apparel, now fast disap- dearing amid our democratic and leveling social institutions. What shall we say of the medical student of to duy ? Is not his time fully occupied in the minimum period of those three years required for his collegiate study ? I)o not theory and practice, civil and military sur- gery, the art of the accoucheur, chemistry, pathology, anatomy, materia medica, therapeutics, and microscopy all demand his ulmost simultaneous attention ? Are not journals awaiting to be read, hospitals and dispenaa- ries to be visited, museums to be examined, medical societies to be attended, and new books to be looked into ? And where can you find time for re- flection and digestion ? The history of Europe since 1801, and of this country since 18J12, is preg- nant with causes which have resulted in placing scientific medicine where you now find it. The Peninsular war (1801, 1812) and the recent Amer- ican Rebellipn have each produced a marked influence upon cotenq>ornry physicians and upoiumcdical education. The new spirit infused into French and British medicine by the surgical writers of Na|fc>leon’s and Wel- lington’s long campaigns will be reproduced, or rather is now revivifying the profession in America from similar causes operative in the vast Amer- ican armies, and well-appointed military museums. How fast we make history now-a-days is well illustrated by the rapid and complete collection in the adjacent army museum—a collection whose arrangement and com- pleteness may well fill you with pride. When that museum can be made more accessible to every student in this MetrojKjlis ; when its various cata- logues shall be completed and printed; when the labors of its histriograph- ers are more advanced, then the value of the institution will be apparent to even the most unreflecting student. Every preparation in yonder vast museum teems with instruction for him who can read it aright. It is a synopsis of the good and bad medicine and surgery of the late war. I feel sure coming years will make that museum more and more efficient for your good. In their several introductory lectures, my fellow-professors will say to you their first words of advice ; they will explain to you the topics they propose to treat, will give you directions how you can most profitably study each particular branch. They will, as the winter goes on, become better and better acquainted with you as men and with your mental pecu- liarities. There is no one universal method either of teaching or of study. These professors are men skilled in the business of medical instruction, who can and will give you all the aid you require. They are more ; they are your personal friends and well-wishers, and will take a life-long inter- est in your professional advancement. Their own successful career in 13 professional distinction should awaken your emulation, and incite you to take an advanced place among the physicians of your time, while their wisdom and experience will assist you to make your wishes possibilities. Books are now comparatively cheap, and such is their varied excellence that it is difficult to say that one is really better for your purposes than another. All the illustrative arts are invoked for your instruction. En- graving, painting, wax and plaster models, the photograph, microscope, and calcium lantern, all tend to aid you in comprehending oral instruction. The private “quiz” and more public class examinations all aid you in testing your progress. Make haste slowly, multum non multa, should be your motto. Master a little daily, however slowly you advance ; let your progress be real, into solid learning. Become not confused in attempting to much, but do a little steadily and do that little well. The diploma must not—indeed, it cannot—terminate your period of professional study. It only places you in more favorable conditions to pursue these studies, and testifies that you have mastered the rudiments of the art and the elements of our science. Judgment and tact, rather than encyclopedial learning, are the characteristics of every successful practitioner. The sneer of a court gentleman, which so wounded the enthusiastic Lettsome—“Doctor, the ancients attempted to make medicine a science and failed ; you moderns have rendered it a trade and have succeeded”—embraces, if not the whole truth, a large moiety of it, at least. It is a trade ; a noble trade, requiring liberal culture, high personal honor, and a heart alive to the claims of human suffering; but it is further a trade amenable for success or failure to the ordinary principles of human business affairs. Politeness, punctu- ality, accuracy, promptness, courage, kindness and address, do much in all these matters to secure success. Can we conjecture with any profit what manner of men or women, per- haps, the professors and students of the next century will be. Are we to give back to you, ladies, the apothecary’s and Leech’s arts as you held them in the days of Rebecca, the Jewess, and her knightly lover ? Will men retain only those portions of our art where physical strength and masculine courage are specially demanded? Who can say. If so, how can the tender duties of maternity and wifehood be performed ? Is the maiden to forget her beauty and the bride her ornaments in the bright period of early womanhood to spend hours in the hospital wards and dis- secting rooms? We hope not. Believing most deeply and thankfully that God has made you lovely and to be loved, we trust you will cling to the duties and privileges of girlhood and womanhood, wifehood and ma- ternity, rather than barter these away for diplomas and the doctorate. We do not here mean to say one word to discourage those self-sacrificing women who, in spite of almost overwhelming obstacles, are highly-edu- cated physicians in Europe and America as practitioners or medical teach- ers of their own sex. The success of a Boivan and La Chapelle assure us that society can appreciate, and employ, and honor, and remunerate the thoroughly-educated woman, even in the medical art. Will cold water or electricity be the sole therapeutic agents of the future ? 14 We trow not. Will the lancet become a relic of past barbarism ? We reckon not, great as is the desuetude into which this venerable instrument has fallen. Will the doses of all drugs become more and more minute, until an ounce of opium or calomel will last a druggist a life time ? We think this is not probable; medical opinion seems to revolve in a circle ; the thing that hath been, that shall be again ; and those best read in medi- cal history know that our medical administrations do not differ much essentially from those of Hipocrates. Hut the average of human life is lengthening, owing to a better hygiene and a more cautious therapeutics; even if the viability of infants and old people is diminished. Hence in years to come, a new and sj)ecial interest will attach to the care of children and old persons. Fewer children are born, per family, in Euroo or America to-day, and fewer reared to manhood than at the beginning of this century. Women marry later and men earlier than did our grand- fathers and grandmothers. The human race, in highly jiolished nations, is now suffcrring the results of this artificial reversal of a natural law, whereby men formerly exceeded their wives in years, physical maturity, and worldly experience. Insanity, convulsive and neuralgic diseases are on the increase, and the respectable gout of our forefathers, with its concomitant longevity, hus well nigh gone out of fashion. Except in the prize ring, man seems unable to endure physical suffcrring, and chloroform and alcohol are employed to letheonize bodily and mental anguish. Tubercle and cancer are as fatal now as they were before the stethescojw} of Laennec and the microscope of Lelwjrt were first employed to demonstrate their presence. Food, clothing, and fuel are more and more costly every year, and money is consequently depre ciated, when we measure its value by the price of these necessary condi- tions of human maintenance. The gross dinners and heavy supers of one hundred years ago are almost unknown, and anemia and loss of vitality mark whole communities of half fed denizens of our large Christian cities. In any period of military medicine were milk and brandy so largely used as in the Crimea and in our own American Hospitals within a few years? A barrel of flour or a quarter of well fatted meat, is a store house of muscular and nervous force. The market houses and grocer shops of this city are the reservoirs whence are drawn daily the physical and mental strength of this population. Call it carbon and phosphorus, as do Mole- schott and chemists ; call it heat, or electricity, or actheria, as do the trans- cendental physicists, bread iB truly the stuff of life ; and drugs and regimen are only valuable as they enable the living machine to eat, drink, and sleep, without sufferring immediate or remote. The medical student of the future will probably be better informed than we are of the laws of physiology and hygiene ; time will lead to, and srt will afford, instruments for the recognition of now unsuspected and unde- tected causes of disease. Hetter municipal regulations and improved ma- chinery in the economic manufactures of wood, iron, cotton, silk, wool, dye and color stutts, will render the injuries met with in civil surgical practice less frequent and less serious. Pharmacy must and will improve 15 With every improvement in practical chemistry. Therapeutics is being simplified from year to year. Pathology and human anatomy are even now exact sciences. Better, briefer, more lucid text books you or your successors may and will write, and the path of the medical student of the future may be freed from many obstacles which now impede your progress. In this work, young gentlemen, you must do your part; when men have reached our ages they do little more than restate and re-express the convictions which we reached in earlier years. We cannot get rid ot our past judgements and prejudices, even if we would. They cling to us like our personal habits, and we neither will nor can throw them olf. Young physic, then, may play strange tricks with our philosophies and our dogmas. But they are our best and most painfully garnered experiences, and have directed us so far rightly by the bedside of sufferring men and women and children. The facts ascertained by Albinus and Boerhaave, and Hunter, and Cullen, and Jenner, and Louis, and Virchow are facts, whatever be the fate of their philosophies. What manner of young men will constitute the classes of coming years we may then ask—and reply : Men filled with a sense of the dignity of their vocation; men willing to think and act for the good of mankind. Men who love and honor the better although the weaker sex. Men who know the value of the gently slumbering babe, the mature and vigorous father, the loving, patient wife, and the silvery headed sire. Men who value human life, human society, and all the sweet amenities which cluster around Christian men’s homes. Men in whose safekeeping such interests may prudently be risked. Men who will use diligently and faith- fully the better means of study and of investigation time may afford. Then as now, the pursuit they are engaged in will add dignity to their youth and inexperience ; and then as now the real student of medicine will be recognized as a useful and respectable member of an honorable and liberal fraternity. When you and we shall have become ancients, the spirit of the Ciceronian maxim will animate the student of the future ! “Homines ad deos nulla re proprius accedunt quam salutem hominibus dando.” In conclusion, it is proper to remind you that on an occasion like the present we should not overlook the filial relation which this Medical De- partment bears to the venerable school of learning from which we derive our corporate character. I feel sure the eminent and faithful men who pre- side over that Ancient Seat of Polite Learning share with us a sincere pride in the present welfare and growing importance of this department in their University. My acquaintance with the past history of this medical school enables me to say that the Faculty of Georgetown College has, from the first year of your efforts up to the present hour, cordially seconded and aided you in every plan matured for the development of this medical school. It is fortunate that nearly all who were actually engaged in the origination, in 1851, of this medical school are still living and present with us here to-night. Permit me to utter for this assembly their otherwise silent congratulations upon your successful efforts. You, gentlemen, have 16 been peculiarly fortunate in being able to see the Institution Income an acknowledged success, with annual increase in its classes ; its staff of in- structors enlarged from year to year; at length larger and more commo- dious buildings required, obtained, and eonviently furnished. From year to year the apparatus for teaching Incoming more and more, such as is required in a first class professional school. The events of the past seven years, instead of crippling your success, have infused vigor into your faculty and added increased numbers, im- portance and interest to our classes. Hut the speaker must not further trespass upon your patience. We thank you, fellow-citizens of Washington and Georgetown, for this manifestation of your interest in our welfare. To the Faculty of George- town College we make our grateful acknowledgements for their unvarying and polite cooperation in all our Commencement Exercises. To the ladies who have granted their presence and grace and beauty to this assembly, the speaker desires to express his full sense of the obligation they have thereby imposed. To woman more than to our rougher sex you will be indebted, young gen- tlemen, for your success or failure in your offices in the sick room. To her intelligence and instinctively correct observations you will, little by little, learn to look for your most valuable aid in estimating the condition of your patients and the action of your drugs. Her faith in your skill will add to your confidence in yourselves. Her never-wearying patience and forbearance will make recovery possible and actual, when otherwise your professional learning would be futile. Her approval and gently-si>okcn praise, be the woman clad in the soft garments of elegant wealth or in the coarse attire of the humble poor, will be, must be, your highest and best reward. If woman value you, respect you, trust you, your success is cer- tain. If your acquirements are shallow ; if you are mere pretenders to professional skill, sagacious women will be the first to find you out, and to trumpet far and wide your incomlatency. The sick, in God’s arrange- ment of sublunary affairs, owe their lives and restoration to health to the nurse and to the doctor—a trueism you should never forget. Well said the poet of Abbottsford, from his ]>ersonal experience : “Oh woman ! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, ami hard to please, And vari aide as the shade, By the light, quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou."