[Reprint from The Alienist and Neurologist, St. Louis,'Oct. 1893J. 
ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT, 
C. H. HUGHES, M. 1)., St. Louis, Mo., 
AT THE 
B H N Q U E T 
IN HONOR OF THE 
FIRST PAN-AMERICAN MEDICAL CONGRESS, 
GIVEN BY THE 
AMERICAN MEDICAL EDITORS’ ASSOCIATION, 
At The Arlington, Washington, U. S. A., Sept. 4, 1893. 
/GENTLEMEN : I take pleasure in meeting you to- 
night and in calling you to order. 
We are in the midst of a picnic—I mean a panic, for 
we had our picnic last November. I am glad to meet 
with you to-night, fellow-cranks. In thus addressing you 
I would not have it inferred that I consider you, my 
esteemed and estimable colleagues, mentally unsound or 
crooked. I use the term in no such an invidious sense. 
You may think I ought to use the term in the psycho- 
pathic sense, and call you fellow-lunatics, to assemble -at 
such a time as this to discuss anything but the monetary 
questions of mono- or bi-metalism, the Sherman law, the 
financial situation and the salvation of the country gen- 
erally. No, fellow-cranks, the country has gone crazy 
over the delusion that it is about bursted, when it never 
was better oft, in fact, than now ; when people never had 
so much money to hide away in stockings and bury in the 
ground; never had better crops or finer or more stock 
on their farms, though corporation stocks are a little shaky. 
One set of cranks up on the hill yonder (the Capitol), 
has the delusion that the country will go to the devil if 
Congress does not repeal the Sherman act; the other, that 
it will if it does, and tries to do without free silver. They 
labor under the delusion that they are Napoleons and 
doctors of finance. They are quacks and calamity howlers ! 2 
Banquet First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
Fellow-cranks, it is a glorious thing to be our kind of 
cranks. We of the press are the cranks that move the 
medical, moral, political and social world, and money is our 
lever. If we only had enough of the leverage we would 
be all right and pass on to the goal of the world’s glory, 
philanthropically forgetting our own. We are the cranks 
that turn the grindstones and grist mills of progress, 
outside of the Government department (we are not in it 
there), “change the zig-zag or shuttle motion” of the polit- 
ical machine into harmonious reciprocal, useful motion, and 
vice versa, “ into smooth circular movement.” We make the 
wheels go round. We move the steam and electric machin- 
ery of medical and moral progress. That is the sort of 
“cranks” we full of spirit, brisk and lively, as Spencer 
and Webster define us to be. 
Without disparaging the Herculean labors of the Sec- 
retary-General and others, I may safely say the Archimedean 
lever which has lifted this First Pan-American Medical 
Congress of the Western world to the mountain top of 
professional appreciation has been the medical press of 
America ; but, in this connection, we must not omit court- 
eous recognition of the aid of the secular press. Its hand, 
too, has helped us. Without the unfaltering courage and 
manly fidelity of our craft to this Congress, it must have 
sunk under the weight of the present financial stringency 
and depression, and proved a dismal failure. But, gentle- 
men, we turned the crank of our influence in the right 
direction and secured the success of the First Pan-Ameri- 
can Medical Congress, under the most discouraging circum- 
stances. We are the cranks by which the current of the 
world’s best blood of mental life is made to flow—the 
cranks of which Shakespeare speaks when he refers to the 
food as being sent 
Through the rivers of your blood, 
And through the cranks and offices of men, 
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins 
Of the great body of the world’s thought and action. Banquet First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
3 
From us the world’s medical people “receive that natural 
competency whereby they live.” 
The ends we aim at are those of the highest literary 
and scientific principles. They are God’s and Truth’s. 
With editorial microscope, test-tube and crucible, we look, 
through Nature, up to Nature’s God, and see the source of 
all power manifest through the primordial and develop 
mental cells, solving all the principles of growth, waste and 
decay in the human organism. As the astronomer sees an 
omnipotence in the laws of movement of the shining orbs 
of heaven, so we see remotely law in the combining of the 
elements and movements of organism. We are the sani- 
tary weather prophets, that give the people warning and 
health forecasts. “ Salus populi ” is our motto. “ Salus 
populi supremo, lex esto ” is the motto on the escutcheon 
of my native State, and it is the accepted principle of our 
republican government, and of all government of the peo- 
ple, for the people and by the people, under our estimable 
and just political system. In the hearts of all loyal 
Americans, vox populi has the force, and is fairly expressive 
of, vox Dei for the nation’s enduring welfare and perpetual 
safety, and the prayer of every American heart is, esto 
perpetua I would paraphrase this and say, sanitas populi 
supremo lex esto. [Applause.] The health of the people 
is intimately blended with their welfare, and it is the med- 
ical press that proclaims health to the people and will 
perpetually secure the healing of all the nations. The 
sanitas is the salus suprema populi. Without health, men- 
tally and bodily—and the former is dependent on the 
latter—nations hasten to decay. The ill health of the two 
Napoleons lost to France her military prestige. 
111 fares the land to hastening ills a prey, 
When wealth accumulates and men decay. 
When Rome was in perfect health she ruled the world 
when the stalwart, robust, healthy arms of her soldiery, un- 
degenerated by the diseases and decay which followed 
the luxury of conquest, carried her victorious eagles, the Banquet First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
4 
world acknowledged her sway. Then “ to be a Roman 
was greater than a king.” They had strength in their 
psychomotor, ganglionic and spinal centers, and power of 
organic reconstruction. Their physique—cerebral and 
muscular—inspired to valorous deeds and to the grandest 
thoughts. Her statesmen, her jurists, her lawyers, her 
poets, her physicians and her philosophers, who have left 
any precept worthy of being treasured or any example 
worthy of being followed, were men of health. The deeds 
and doctrines of her philosophers, her doctors of medicine, 
her doctors and teachers of morality, of law, of philosophy, 
of war, have left no such lesson in them from the days 
of her decadence, except the lesson of calamity and its 
causes, the diseases to be warned against. And so it has 
been with every nation that has risen and fallen into deca- 
dence or has been blotted out from the pages of later 
history since Rome’s ignoble decline and fall Since thin 
the subdued barbarians of her ancient borders, profiting 
by the lesson of her decadence and the diseases incident 
to her downfall, have supplanted Rome with a healthier 
and sturdier race. 
We have learned what this physical and mental 
decadence means. The modern Germans were the sani- 
tary cranks that turned the tables back on ancient Rome 
and kept the wheels of progress steadily going forward 
until the German Empire has become one of the fore- 
most of the nations of the world, all because they were 
not permitted to fall into luxury and consequent decay. 
She had not the opportunity to lose the rich red blood 
of her ancestors through conquered indolence and lux- 
urious ease. And so long as a wise medical and secular 
press can keep the standard of her people’s health high, 
she will maintain her military prestige and her honor. So 
it will be with America. 
The tri-color of La Belle France will likely never 
again defy the thunderings of the world’s artillery as 
in the days of the great Napoleon. Never, either 
through diplomacy or the power of her arms, except in the Banquet First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
5 
possibly returned vigor of renewed mental and physical 
health, such as enabled the gieat Napoleon to direct, 
and his soldiery to achieve, the scaling of the Alps and 
fight and win victories by descending from the clouds. 
So it will be with us and with every nation. 
The courage of the American Revolution, its auda- 
cious Declaration of Independence, its vigorous and suc- 
cessful resistance to the British arms, were the courageous 
physiological expression of the fearless blood and brawn 
of health that inspired them to think and dare to do with 
Herculean strength for the right. If you would make a 
people great and glorious in the arts, in sciences, in lit- 
erature, in morals, in arms, in high-minded men that 
constitute the safest and best guardians of a State, give 
them good health, encourage their physicians to be great 
doctors, not mere nurses and apothecaries, and your med- 
ical journalists to be broad-minded, fearless men, in pro- 
claiming the truths that constitute and contribute to the 
sanitary welfare of mankind, and make men great and 
women fair and good. 
Now, as a physician, a practitioner of the healingart, 
a teacher of medicine in school and with journal, I dare 
to proclaim that the wisest and best thing this Govern 
ment can do, both for its present and future welfare, for 
its perpetuity and growth among the nations, the most 
powerful, most beneficent and grandest of governments, 
would be to create a Bureau of Sanitation [Applause], 
not merely to keep out foreign epidemics of contagious 
diseases, but a psychical and physical sanitation of the 
many forms of disease of body and mind known to science 
and modern medical progress, and recognize the profes- 
sion of medicine as it does that of law, of agriculture 
and arms, by giving the most distinguished and capable 
of its votaries a proper and deserving place in the Cabi- 
net of the Nation. [Applause.] 
It is now my painful duty to introduce to you the 
chief chutmuck of this great family of cranks, the charm- 
ing, the accomplished, the lovely daisy symoosiarch of 6 
Banquet First Pan-American Medical Congress. 
the evening. He comes froryi the wild and woolly 
West, where he holds the Medical Mirror up to nature 
and lets his contributors do their own reflecting. It 
would be a reflection on him to say that he reflects 
much himself, when he can get anybody else to do this 
business for him. Put the brakes on the cranks of 
your mental machinery, brother quill-drivers, and bring 
your minds to a halt while you listen to him, and 
give your brains a rest. Rest and recuperate while 
you may listen to the toastmaster. He is more mel- 
lifluous of voice than a mocking bird, and to look 
upon, charming as a daisy or a big sunflower. [Applause.]