COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR. 
ADDRESS 
DEDICATORY OF THE NEW BUILDINGS 
ERECTED BY THE 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
FOR ITS 
DENTAL SCHOOL AND MEDICAL LABORATORIES. • 
BY 
S. WEIR MITCHELL, M.D., 
MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF THE SCIENCES. 
DELIVERED OCTOBER 2, 1878, IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVER- 
SITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AT THE ONE HUNDRED AND 
THIRTEENTH SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY. 
PHILADELPHIA: 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
1878. DEDICATORY ADDRESS. 
Gentlemen :-I have been asked as Chairman of the Com- 
mittee of Trustees on the Department of Medicine to receive 
the splendid gift of the new buildings just announced by the 
Provost. I have been also honored by a request on the part of 
the Faculty of Medicine to say a few fitting .words to the class 
at the opening of this, the one hundred and thirteenth session 
of the University. Nor is it possible, or right, to forget on an 
occasion so peculiar, that it is not only the student to whom I 
am to speak, but that I have in part a lay audience; and that 
what I say here, as representative of the policy and views of this 
school, may be read by many outside of this building. 
If, then, a part of what falls from me be familiar in the ears of 
many on this platform, and to some of those before me, I bid 
them remember that the interests of the medical profession, and 
the position of this University with regard to education of all 
forms, are matters of the utmost moment to this whole Com- 
monwealth and Country. 
Fifty years ago the public concerned itself little as to any 
form of scientific progress,-and, save to open its mouth and 
shut its eyes, and to take what the doctor gave, like the 
children, it did not greatly disturb itself whether medicine 
improved or not. 
For the individual doctor there was, and still is, the bedside 
jury of the patient's friends, swayed by fear, flattered by recovery, 
-always, from mere circumstance, unable to judge with fairness. 
This court, which, even yet, acquits or condemns with equal 
lack of reason, is still our immediate censor and judge. But 
the profession as a body, in its gains of thought and action, in 
1 2 
DE Die A TOR Y ADDRESS. 
its restless ingenuity, in its alertness to profit by discoveries in 
Chemistry and Physics,-in a word, the profession of Medicine, 
as such, no longer lives a life of intellectual seclusion. 
The increase in the number of scientific men, not physicians; 
the diffusion of knowledge as to Anatomy and Physiology; the 
ever-increasing interest in all forms of scientific activity; the 
growing value attached to Hygiene and to large measures of 
sanitary use; and what I might call the secularization of every 
addition to medical knowledge, by its instant record in news- 
papers, popular science journals, and reviews, have combined to 
give us, as a profession at least, what we once lacked,-a court, 
where we are heard with respect, and, for the most part, judged 
with fairness and interest. We have to-day a larger hold on 
the world than once we had; and therefore it is, Gentlemen of 
the Class, that in now addressing you students of medicine, I 
must be careful to remember that in the busy outside world 
thousands are intelligently interested in the mode in which we 
train you, and in the manner in which the responsibilities of a 
great position in this country, and of a trust long held, are dealt 
with by what we like to call, in a phrase too much abused, this 
time-honored University. 
Let him that hath been honored have more conscience for it: 
Time honors them alone that honor Time 
In Duty's quest, heart-whole with sense of right. 
Time is for the wise but opportunity prolonged, and in the 
roll of notable teachers whose works have illustrated this school 
of learning, there have been many who lived by these precepts, 
and who have, in the highest sense, honored their Mother with 
all the honors which a century enabled them to gather. 
Year after year some one of this distinguished line has stood, 
as I stand here to-day, to call upon the student for steady, 
honest work, and to sum up the growth of knowledge, widening 
like the growth of morning. Each year there were changes to 
chronicle, something new to learn, something old to unlearn 
or cease to learn. 
By and by, the result of these numberless changes in medi- 
cine amounted, in practice, to a revolution so complete as to make 
it clear to all that the old plans of education needed revision. DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
3 
For a long time, indeed, thoughtful men in our profession 
had been dissatisfied with modes of instruction which sent out 
the graduate utterly untrained, and left him to learn his busi- 
ness, with what caution his conscience might advise, on such 
as usually fall to the young doctor's care,-the poor and the 
needy. 
Many years ago this sense of dissatisfaction with the older 
plan of teaching had reached the Faculty of the University, and 
finally led, with other changes, to the creation of a great hos- 
pital, which was meant to be, first and foremost, a means of help 
to the sick, and also a place where disease could be studied at 
the bedside. This step was followed last year by a radical 
change in the whole system of medical tuition,-a change in 
which we had been already anticipated by Harvard University, 
and with the nature of which most of you are familiar. 
It seems almost idle to defend an approach to what is far 
below the grade of instruction we ought to give, and mean at 
some future day to give; and yet, for plain reasons, I shall ask 
you to hear me as to this, because a part of what I have to 
say will continue to be needed, until every school of medicine 
in America is engaged, not in seeing how many students it can 
count and graduate, but in honest rivalry as to who shall best 
educate the best men. 
Until very lately, as you well know, a student was expected 
to spend a year in a doctor's office, to attend two courses of 
lectures, and to pass an examination. The city student, and 
the rich, of course, possessed advantages. The year in the 
doctor's office in any great city was a valuable help, and gave 
the chance for as much attendance on lectures as was desirable, 
while hospitals and dispensaries were open to the city student 
during all his years of study. Preceptorship in cities was also, 
and still is, the occupation of ambitious, active, young men, 
whose competition keeps the business of personal teaching in 
a wholesome state. 
Far otherwise was it in the country. The teacher, untrained 
for his work, could at the most show his student a few cases, 
answer his questions, and tell him, from remembrance of his 
own far-away days of study, what to read. Then, as the pre- 
ceptor in the country was usually chosen for his position as a 4 
DEDICATORY ADDRESS. 
practitioner, he was apt to be a man more or less advanced in 
life, and was, therefore, remote from contact with the constant 
novelties which are every day on trial, and was the last to be 
influenced by those cumulative, and what I might call molec- 
ular, changes in medicine, which, far more than single dis- 
coveries, alter radically, but silently, the views and acts of our 
profession. In the dull days of medicine this did well enough, 
but it has long ceased to replace practically the apprentice 
system which it was meant to imitate ; and when the student 
came from it to the city he was ill able to profit by what he saw, 
or to digest the boundless meal which, in kind as in amount, 
was made alike for every digestion. He went to lectures which 
puzzled him by their depth and troubled him by their number. 
Seated on benches more or less remote, he heard clinics, and 
saw patients examined ; he beheld professors listen to chests, 
he saw them see, he saw them touch, he heard them draw con- 
clusions and make diagnoses. He had little or no chance to 
listen, or to touch, or to see closely. He was not taught as an 
individual. He could not ask questions by the way; he got 
what he could, and, with our strange national adaptability, a 
good deal more than young men of most nations would have 
gotten. 
The system was a poor one always, but that which made it so 
utterly worthless was the gradual introduction into all branches 
of medicine of an accurate knowledge founded on precise 
methods, making use of instruments of precision, and of fixed 
standards of comparison. By these means what my friend 
Dr. Billings has aptly called " predictive medicine" has been 
made usefully larger day by day. 
By predictive medicine, I understand such means as enable 
us with exactness to say what is the matter with a man, what 
will come of his disorder, what will be the precise effects on a 
given set of conditions, normal or abnormal, of the addition of 
a new condition, such as low temperature or a certain alkaloid 
or salt. 
It is the multiplication of accurate methods, aided by arms 
of precision, which have made the need for our hospital and 
dispensary teaching, for the vast laboratories which we open 
to-day, and for that direct, constant, individual teaching by DED1CA TOR V ADDRESS. 
5 
demonstrators and tutors, as well as by lectures, which this 
University has been at such costly pains to furnish. 
I have laid much stress upon the need to learn the easy every- 
day use of those instruments of precision without which ac- 
curacy in medicine is impracticable. What has been the 
accomplishment of the few we desire to make the readily-used 
property of the many. 
And let me pause here to say that to the country physician 
a knowledge of all the really practical instruments of use in 
diagnosis is much more needful than to those who live in great 
cities. Alone with acute cases in the silence of the night, away 
from all help save what his own training gives, he must settle 
questions and decide for and by himself. Even in chronic cases, 
where accurate predictive science is most valuable and most 
difficult, and where the assistance to be had from definite 
methods is largest, he must, save in the case of the rich, decide 
alone. In great towns, there is for the latter class, to be had at 
short notice, the aid of some one of the many accomplished 
consultants whose opinion a vast experience has made valuable. 
And even for the poorest the like resource is constantly open, 
through clinics and hospitals, directed by the ablest men in the 
profession. 
In thinking over the causes which have led us by degrees to 
such changes in medical practice as have made our old means 
of teaching a mere caricature of what teaching should be, I 
have come upon a group of facts which have singularly inter- 
ested me, and which are, I think, not very generally known. 
They illustrate the history of instruments of precision in 
medicine, and show how hard it is, or was, to introduce into 
familiar use methods for which the mass of the profession is 
not ready; while also they show, if I mistake not, how swift it 
is to seize upon and use them when that time has come. 
Until a period so recent as to be almost within the memory 
of some who hear me, the means of studying disease were 
limited to what we learned through the unaided sight and 
touch. For, save to listen to what a patient had to tell, the 
sense of hearing gave us no help, until we were taught the 
splendid lesson of what to hear, and how to hear it, by those 
three greatest of listeners, Avenbrugger, Corvisart, and Laennec. 6 
DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
The books of the end of the seventeenth century and of the 
early part of the eighteenth, in their immense minuteness of 
detail as to the pulse and the character of the secretions, show 
how the doctor strove, by almost painful notation of the facts 
he saw, to enable himself to relate such changes to the essential 
and more hidden phenomena of disease. 
A vast number of the pulses and appearances of tongue and 
faeces and urine, which are set down in the books of that day, 
we no longer think of moment, or have learned to group to- 
gether, or to read more correctly. In fact, the physician had 
gone as far as was possible for him to go with unaided senses, 
and he had now to wait until other help came to him, and until 
physics and chemistry were so advanced as to lend a helping 
hand. 
Of the first practical, and really available attempt in this way, 
in the reign of Anne, an almost romantic echo comes down to 
us from middle-age Italy. 
When Galileo watched the lamp swinging in the Cathedral 
of Pisa, thinking its vibrations to be in equal time, and there- 
fore fit to be measures of duration, he was but eighteen, and 
had begun, much against his wishes, to study medicine. De- 
siring to have at once some test of the regularity of the swing 
of his, pendulum, he is said to have used that wonderful clock, 
the pulse, as a test. 
This was a grave moment in the history of medicine. It was 
the birth of precision; nor can we conceive of a more striking 
picture than this wonderful boy, in the gloom of the darkened 
church, intent on a fact which was, by and by, to give to every 
science the pregnant gift of exact measures of time. 
It is also interesting to note, in passing, that, some forty years 
later, when near the end of his life, Galileo, in describing the 
accuracy of his first clock-work, still refers to the pulse as a 
measure of exactness. " My clock," he says, " will not vary 
so much as the beat of a pulse." 
From using the pulse as a test of the regularity of the pen- 
dulum, he seems to have been led, when but a lad, to make 
use of the pendulum to measure the pulse-rate. His instru- 
ment was known as the pulsilogon. The method of using it 
was most ingenious. Having always a pendulum of equal DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
7 
weight, he set it swinging, and then shortened the string or 
lengthened it until the beats corresponded with those of the 
patient's pulse. Then he measured the length of the string, 
and Mr. B's pulse would be represented arbitrarily, but most 
precisely, by, we will say, ten inches; Mrs. C's by eight inches. 
Galileo seems to have given little care to this invention, and 
does not speak of the medical use of the pendulum in any of 
his essays. The most we know of it comes down to us from 
his pupil, Viviani. 
A contemporary of Galileo, also an Italian, professor of medi- 
cine at Padua, the well-known Sanctorius, describes in 1626 
several forms of what he also called the pulsilogon. There is 
little doubt that this was precisely the same instrument that was 
used by Galileo, and left through his large-minded indifference 
to be appropriated by the first unscrupulous claimant. 
Meanwhile, Galileo had invented the thermometer, and is said 
to have applied it to medical uses, as Sanctorius undoubtedly 
did many years after. During this brilliant era of Italy, Medi- 
cine had thus offered to it such chance of gain as came to it 
not again for many a day. 
The use of the thermometer in disease must in fact have 
been quite common, since thermometers of special form were 
invented for this purpose, and used by tying them on to the 
wrist. The Grand Duke Ferdinand the Second seems to have 
been among the most able of those who improved upon Galileo's 
instrument, and some of Ferdinand's pulse thermometers were 
shown in 1876 at the South Kensington exhibition of scientific 
instruments.* 
These inventions served, however, so far as medical progress 
was concerned, only to illustrate the ingenuity of individual 
observers, and were without permanent influence; perhaps be- 
cause the methods used were difficult, and involved costly and 
cumbrous apparatus; perhaps because the profession was not 
yet so educated as to be able to make practical use of them. 
* See report on Italian Instruments, South Kensington Special Loan Collection, 
1876, p. too et seq. Also Viviani's Life of Galileo, and that by De Nelli. Sanc- 
torius' works are not to be found in any American library; at least there is no copy 
of his Comm, in Libri Avicennae, Venice, 1626, which contains details as to his 
pulsilogon and thermometers. 8 
DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
Be this as it may, the precious gifts were thrust aside, and we 
hear little again of precision in observation until in the reign of 
Anne, 1707, appeared a book which is little known, almost never 
read, and which contains an account of a new effort to introduce 
into medicine an instrument of precision. You will feel, perhaps, 
some sense both of surprise and of amusement, when I tell you 
that it was the watch; or, as the inventor, Sir John Floyer, calls 
it, the "pulse watch." For, after Sanctorius, until about 1707, 
few counted the pulse accurately, or left on record any state- 
ment as to its number, save that it was slow or fast, feeble or 
bounding, or what not. I do not find that Harvey once men- 
tions the number of the pulse- or heart-beat, and in those mar- 
vellous pictures of disease which Sydenham drew with a certain 
artistic breadth of effect, there is a remarkable accuracy of all 
other needful detail, but not a word as to the number of pulse 
or respiration. 
Sir John Floyer dedicates his two volumes, the one to Queen 
Anne, the other to the Duke of Marlborough, since to the 
doctor then, as to the purely literary hack, a patron was neces-, 
sary, until honest old Sam Johnson broke the spell. Sir John 
says that he tried the pulse at first by the minute in common' 
watches, and by pendulum clocks, but "after met" with what 
he calls the " sea minute glass," which may have been used to 
time the log; " but because," he adds, "that was not portable, 
I caused a pulse watch to be made, which ran sixty seconds, 
and I placed it in a box. I also made a half-minute glass, 
whose case turns like a dark lanthorn, and that was portable 
and useful in feeling my patients' pulses, but that differed four 
beats from the minute glass which I always kept at home as 
my standard." 
Then, just as we nowadays speak of an instrument-maker, 
he says, " The pulse watch here treated of is made and sold 
by Mr. Sam Watson, Watchmaker in Longacre, by Sir Jn. 
Floyer's direction." 
With these means Sir John did some good and accurate 
work in the study of the pulse. He was the first to give the 
numbers of pulse and respiration in numerous diseases. He 
studied the number of the pulse in old and young, in pregnancy, 
during rest and exercise, in sleep, under the influence of baths DEDICATORY ADDRESS. 
9 
and of blisters; and he even went so far as to attempt to relate 
the pulse number to states of the barometer and thermometer. 
He was often right, and sometimes wrong, but he knew certain 
facts which have been rediscovered of late years, and he dis- 
played capacities for accurate clinical research which were 
long wanting after his death. Like a good practical doctor, 
he gets a passing fling at pure science in the shape of a remark 
upon the failure of Harvey's discovery of the circulation to 
influence the practice of medicine. 
I presume that in Sir John's day watches with second-hands, 
giving the duration of the minute accurately, were rare or 
unknown. For whatever cause, the habit of accuracy in feeling 
the pulse, and determining its number by an unchanging 
standard, did not prosper, and his prediction that this new plan 
would be sneered at proved only too true. Until the first 
quarter of the present century definite statements as to the 
pulse were rare, and the absence of our familiar minute-hands, 
and even of the minute as a recognized measure of time, is 
illustrated by the rare statements in Morgagni, as when he 
describes a case as having a pulse which beat twenty-two times 
in the sixtieth of an hour. It was only when minute-hands 
had grown common in watches that we come to recognize the 
now familiar picture of the doctor, watch in hand, a finger on 
the pulse, the thoughtful face, the anxious lookers-on around 
the sick-bed. 
This brings us down, as we have seen, to the era of the great 
French teachers who gave us the stethoscope, and forced a 
generation to learn over in new aspects everything it believed 
itself to know about heart and chest disease. It was, and is, an 
instrument of precision, because it enables us to isolate the 
sounds which come from limited regions, but it does not 
magnify sounds as we may hope to do. Every physician 
who deserves the name now uses the stethoscope; but, as 
yet, few men of the mass of physicians have trained them- 
selves to practical use of the many other means which, in later 
years, have come to our aid. 
The microscope has been long known, but it was useless in 
practical medicine until the micro-chemistry of the tissues and 
secretions had been so definitely acquired as to become popu- 10 
DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
lar property. Even as late as when I was a student, those who 
could employ the microscope were, so to speak, marked men. 
To-day, no busy doctor can practise medicine rationally a fort- 
night without using it, or having it used for him. To its em- 
ployment, as a means of studying diseased and healthy tis- 
sues and secretions, we dedicate a very large space in our new 
laboratories, and you will find every room well supplied with 
these instruments of research. 
I do not mean to linger over this familiar tale. The oto- 
scope, laryngoscope, ophthalmoscope, above all the thermom- 
eter, the various forms of galvanic or induction batteries, the 
aesthesiometer, and the sphygmograph, have all of them, or 
nearly all, become a part of the arms of precision with which 
you are called upon to war against disease. 
The list seems formidable, but every one in active practice 
sees every day cases in which, if he means to know the most 
that can be known of his patient's state, one or more, and some- 
times all of them, must be used. Contrast such an examina- 
tion of a patient with that which even a Sydenham felt to be 
sufficient. 
These additions to our means of diagnosis have by degrees 
made medical practice a handicraft, and while making it precise, 
and giving us definite standards of comparison, have made it, 
in some sense, more difficult. 
Our machines are not labor-saving. We employ almost as 
many tools as the surgeon, and more, and also more compli- 
cated ones, than are used by some mechanics. 
To learn how to use the tools of this handicraft in a work- 
shop so delicate and sensitive as the human body, makes 
needful such careful personal instruction as cannot be given 
in the lecture-room alone, and demands the individual training 
of the student in hospital, dispensary, and laboratory, and by 
familiar demonstrations. 
Future generations of students will go out of these halls 
fitted by familiarity with such methods to practise medicine as 
no former graduates have been. It will be their own fault if 
out of the use of instruments of precision there comes not 
other good. In war, the rifle, the telegraph, and the telescope 
have involved the need for greater intelligence in rank and file. DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
11 
In the cotton-mill, the gradual improvement and complication 
of machines have, I am assured, elevated and educated a large 
class of operatives. With us, in a higher sense, the use of re- 
fined instruments, of accurate and unchanging standards, has 
created difficulties, and given a training which tends to raise the 
level of acuteness in the whole range of medical observation, 
and so to give rise to keener criticism, to more exact care, to 
a more intelligent patience. 
You will see that I at least feel sure that the methods to 
which we are trained by instruments of precision help to edu- 
cate us into intellectual habits, which make us more precise in 
what we look for, and see, and note, with our unaided senses. 
Very few of the novel questions of the day, such, for ex- 
ample, as the diagnosis of the locality of brain disease, can be 
answered by the more careless post-mortem studies of past 
years. I might say, indeed, so far more precise are we to-day, 
that a world of dispute would be saved by agreeing not to 
quote for the solution of this problem a single post-mortem 
study made more than ten years ago. There is, in fact, hardly 
one which is not open to hostile criticism, for want of the kind 
of care which to-day is exacted in all well-regulated hospitals. 
Many of you have perhaps been taught that some of the 
instruments of precision to which I have alluded belong, like 
the ophthalmoscope, only to the specially trained practitiqner. 
But ophthalmology, which is, with the exception of the dental 
art, the most perfect, as yet, of all the branches of practice, has 
undergone the change which all specialties undergo. It has 
come to relate itself so widely with general practice, and has 
invented so many easy methods of rapid research, that it has 
grown needful, and indeed easy, for the general practitioner to 
become to a large degree familiar with portions of it once 
considered too difficult for common use. 
Now that we know what questions the ophthalmoscope readily 
solves for us, now that we are aware, for example, how many 
headaches, vertigoes, and other obscure head disorders arise out 
of imperfections in the eyes, considered as optical instruments 
working in unison, it is plain that we must more and more 
strive to learn thoroughly at least enough for diagnosis of the 
modern means of studying the eye. 12 
DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
What I have said of this branch of knowledge applies almost 
equally to the rest. 
One after another of the more difficult forms of study have 
been provided for in our curriculum by the creation of new 
professorships or lectureships. Last of all, it was determined, 
within a year, to complete our list of studies by adding to it a 
school of Dental Medicine and Surgery. This was no sudden 
or novel idea. 
In May, 1851, Dr. E. B. Gardette, of Philadelphia, the well- 
known and distinguished dentist, addressed a memorial to the 
Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, asking for the es- 
tablishment of Lectures on Dental Surgery, and that every 
dentist should be a regularly graduated Doctor of Medicine. 
Again, some years ago, the Faculty of the University memo- 
rialized the Trustees anew on this important subject, but lack 
of means interfered, and it was only within the last year that we 
felt ourselves in condition to offer to students of dentistry all 
that seemed to us to be at present needed for the most com- 
plete education. 
For this purpose the Trustees have created two chairs: one 
of Mechanical Dentistry and Metallurgy, the other of Opera- 
tive Dentistry, Dental Histology, and Dental Pathology; while 
for all the rest of their studies in Physiology, Pharmacy, and 
Anatomy, the students will share with medical students the in- 
structions of our well-known teachers in these branches. The 
present policy of the University will also be carried out in this 
as in other medical studies, with the help of close personal 
teaching by an ample number of paid demonstrators. 
To purposes of dental instruction we devote a large part of 
our new building, and by the free expenditure here made, and 
the completeness of the outfit, the dentists of America will 
judge of the importance we attach to a branch of medicine 
which, more than any other, owes to American genius its most 
valuable improvements,-I might say, almost its creation. Nor 
should I leave this subject without assuring the dental surgeons 
of America that we do not propose to rest content with even 
that large advance which our scheme of teaching now proposes ; 
but we look forward, with their help, to still greater gains, and 
to the time when every dentist will be graduated in medicine, DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
13 
and will elect, after due training, to practise one of its most 
advanced specialties,-the therapeutics and surgery of the teeth. 
I have detained you longer than I meant to do, but I must 
ask yet a few minutes, that I may allude to the relative duties 
of the community and a great school of learning. 
What, then, is the duty of those to whom is confided a trust 
so important as that which we hold ? It certainly is not in the 
direction of that ambition which looks alone to large lists of 
students; to classes which make up in quantity what they lack 
in quality; to education, or its counterfeit made easy; to a host 
of graduates as well prepared to practise medicine as a sailor 
would be to sail a ship after hearing two years of lectures on 
navigation. 
The duty of those who preside over any great school like 
this is to be forever stirred by a noble discontent; to be forever 
asking how they can better their methods; are they giving the 
best education, in the best way, to the men best fitted to profit 
by it ? 
In the exercise of such a lofty self-criticism this great school 
paused in the midst of a career which, in a commercial sense, 
was brilliantly prosperous, and dared to risk great material 
interests in order to meet the demands of the time. 
The step she took was to make such a revolution in medical 
teaching as shall, in the future, send out to practise medicine 
men who will have been honestly trained in every refinement 
of our profession. 
As we give more and give better, we shall expect to get 
more,-more in the way of previous education and intelligence, 
more in the earnest use of the means we offer. 
The result will surely be a class of graduates who will start 
on a higher level, and who will not only feel that they have a 
well-earned right to add the simple M.D. to their names, but 
that, with proud justice to their higher training, and honor- 
ing the mother who taught them, they may write distinctively 
M.D. University of Pennsylvania. 
You are most of you familiar with what we have done. You 
cannot know of the anxious labor, of the individual sacrifices 
on the part of Professors, of the generous bounty which made 
it possible to act with success. 14 
DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
In creating new professorships, in exacting three years of 
carefully-graded study, in adding annual examinations, in the 
large use of personal teaching by paid and numerous demon- 
strators or tutors; by offering in the spring not only the usual 
instruction, but elective studies in Botany, Mineralogy, Hygiene, 
Comparative Anatomy, and Medical Jurisprudence; by stating 
most clearly that we look forward in the future to a longer 
term of annual study and to preliminary examinations,-we 
knew full well that we should run the risk of lessening the 
size of our classes while improving their character. 
When it became at last clear that the movement was desir- 
able, and that we had only to make sure that we did not sacrifice 
the just rights of old and valued servants of the University, we 
met the possible risk of lessened income by a guarantee fund 
of sixty thousand dollars. It was raised in a week; and since 
it was the Trustees and Professors on whom fell at last the re- 
sponsibility of these decisive changes, I am glad to say that 
they did not leave to friends of the University outside its walls 
the whole burden of supplying the means required. 
The first year's experience reassured us. The class fell off 
but little, and I am told that no class, in the remembrance of 
our teachers, has so distinguished itself by steady, systematic 
work. 
Congratulating the men of the last class, and those of the 
new, upon an appreciation of opportunities which, in itself, is a 
test of the quality and ambition of the student, I feel that the 
success of intelligent courage has been ours. We have trusted 
the sagacity of American physicians and the higher instincts 
of American young men, and we have not trusted in vain. 
After the last session our way became so clear that we saw we 
should be embarrassed for room and apparatus wherewith to 
carry out the personal teaching, which is especially full in the 
second and third years of our new system. 
We therefore asked our generous guarantors to convert their 
guarantees into gifts, and with them we have reared the great 
laboratories which to-day we place at your disposal and dedi- 
cate with lofty hopes to noble uses. 
But the duties of a great school do not cease with even the 
full measure of constantly-improving education. This Univer- DEDICA TOR Y ADDRESS. 
15 
sity has a well-organized hospital and well-furnished labora- 
tories. In the possession of these, she acquires and accepts a 
yet higher trust, that of testing older knowledge and of creating 
new. 
This is a matter of which the public, however interested in 
results, or however intelligent it may be, knows but little. It 
is aware that the passing years see a constant and increasingly 
relentless sifting of old ideas and of accepted remedies. It 
sees new gains in surgery and medicine by which it profits. It 
hears casually of new remedies which are tried, and take their 
place or disappear. Of the endless labor, the restless search, 
the wearisome note-taking in hospital wards, the ceaseless in- 
vestigations. of the chemical and physiological laboratory,-in 
a word, of the scientific side of the lives of the higher class of 
medical workers, it knows almost nothing. 
For such purposes laboratories are needed, where physicians 
will receive a welcome, and find means to carry on original re- 
searches which otherwise would prove too costly; since in 
physiology and therapeutics and chemistry the unaided senses 
have long ago done their best, and nowadays every research 
involves the use of expensive apparatus such as only a great 
school can provide. 
To such scientific hospitalities this University invites all who 
can prove their ability to make the world of thought more rich 
by honest use of the means she offers. She looks too, with 
confidence, to see her own teachers use these laboratories for 
researches which shall illustrate her future; feeling sure that 
when her instructors cease to be productive, when they degen- 
erate into mere utterers of other men's thoughts; when her 
hospital has no new words to say of disease, no criticisms on 
old remedies, no suggestions of new; when her laboratories 
send out no records of research; when, in a word, she ceases 
to be freshly productive, and a radiating as well as receptive 
centre, then will her teachings fail to excite in the mind of the 
student that enthusiasm which they no longer possess; then 
will she be thus far untrue to her fertile past, to her scientific 
trust, to her place as a centre of learning,-and then may men 
indeed begin to doubt her future. These responsibilities have 
been well met in the past, quite as well as was possible during 16 
DEDICA TOR V ADDRESS. 
the years that went by, without help from the State, and with 
but rare and slight aid from individuals. 
In the days of little help, this University was never untrue to 
her duties to the profession of medicine or to this Common- 
wealth. In this later time, when a better spirit prevails in this 
State and City, she has been as ready to obey the demands of 
the community, and to supply the craving of medical men for a 
larger and more liberal education. 
That the craving was a real one, the demand a true one, our 
classes already show. My profession, at least, on which depends 
the support we get in the way of pupils, has said in strong 
words, and distinctly in acts, that we shall not be allowed to 
fail. 
And the community,-has it no duties to the University 
which for more than a century has borne the name of the State, 
and which has not failed to give it honorable illustration? 
In place of endowing this and that small college, and strug- 
gling to create universities with inadequate means, let it recall 
the fact that it has here an old and firm organization, a school 
proud of its wholesome capacity to change when change is 
needed. 
This Commonwealth, and the rich within it, can reach us 
with help which was never more needed than now. They can 
remember us in wills; they can follow the noble example of 
Mrs. John Rhea Barton, by endowing medical and other pro- 
fessorships ; they can give means to assist poor and able men 
to carry on original researches ; they can enable us by larger 
salaries to secure the whole time of the highest talent; and 
now that our laboratories are complete, they can place in our 
grounds a competent and endowed free library, which would 
also supply an urgent want of all this western portion of Phila- 
delphia. Last of all, they can help us, and the help must be 
large, to do in a measure for animals what we have done for 
men. They can aid us in the next great enterprise to which, 
in the confidence of wholesome growth, this University already 
looks forward,-the creation of a great American School of 
Veterinary Medicine. Here are our present wants: shall we 
not find some Pennsylvanians waiting to respond to our appeal ?