THE PATHFINDERS. 
Delivered to the Graduated Class of the Barnes Medical College, St. 
Louis, Mo., March 17, 1896. 
JAMES T. JELKS, M.D. 
Professor of Gynecology and Syphilology in Barnes Medical College, St. 
Louis, Mo.; formerly Professor of Genito-Urinary Surgery and Ven- 
ereal Diseases in College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago; 
Ex-President of Arkansas Med. Society ; Ex-Secretary Obstet- 
ric and Gynecological Section American Medical Associ- 
ation ; Member of Chicago Med. Society, Mississippi 
Valley Medical Society, American Ass'n of Ob- 
stetricians aud Gynecologists, and Southern 
Gynecological and Surgical Ass'n, and 
Ex-chairman of Section on Anatomy 
and Surgery of American Medical 
Ass'n.; Consulting Surgeon 
Mo. P. and I. M. Ry's. 
HOT SPRINGS, ARK. 
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, 
REPRINTED FROM THE 
APRIL 18, 1896. 
CHICAGO: 
American Medical Association Press. 
1896. THE PATHFINDERS. 
JAMES T. JELKS, M.D. 
Gentlemen of the Graduated Class:-I have been 
requested by the faculty of Barnes Medical College to 
address a few words to you in parting. I feel the im- 
portance of the occasion, and if I shall say anything 
which you can carry home with you and which will 
enable you to be better physicians or truer men I will 
have done much. You have passed your final exam- 
ination for the degree of M.D.; upon this I congratu- 
late you and trust the future may bring to you, 
all that your mind can picture of success or your 
heart crave of sympathy. 
You have only made a beginning; have simply 
learned the alphabet of your new life. We have tried 
to teach you how to study; how to use the tools of 
your new calling; have simply laid the foundation; 
upon this you must build a superstructure of hay, 
wood or stubble, or a structure of solid materials 
which will weather the storms of adverse fate, or come 
through the fires of criticism unscathed; then I say, 
your life work is just begun; remember the battle is 
not necessarily to the swift or the brilliant, but suc- 
cess comes rather to the painstaking, laborious one, 
who knows no such word as fail, and who is willing 
and anxious to work, contented, if he does well what- 
soever his hands find to do. 
Think not there are no more worlds to conquer; 
that the wonderful strides in the arts and sciences of 
medicine and surgery during the last twenty, yea, ten 
years, leaves no field for you to investigate. Some 
one of you may be an Alexander to lead the hosts of 
sanitary science along new fields and beside pleasant 
pastures. Few thought two months since of the pos- 2 
sibility of photographing through opaque objects, and 
yet to-day, the world is familiar with the " X" ray of 
Roentgen, and its possibilities in medicine and sur- 
gery, as they loom up before us, are fairly dazzling. 
Here is a Pathfinder indeed: and we believe the time is 
not far distant when we shall see our friends as we talk 
with them over the telephone, whether they be in the 
next house, the next town, or as far from us as St. Louis 
is from New York. New worlds are lying out all around 
us waiting a conqueror who shall show us the way. 
"Then be up and doing, 
With a heart for any fate ; 
Still achieving, still pursuing 
Learn to labor and to wait." 
There are two classes of men in life. The artist 
who plans, who leads the way, and the artisan who 
follows and does the work planned for him by the 
leader. These two comprise the working classes of 
humanity. Of the first class or 
I propose to speak a few words to you to-night, hop- 
ing thereby so to stimulate you in your work that 
some one among you may develop as a leader among 
men. 
It is an easy matter for any one to follow the king's 
highway from place to place. It is comparatively easy 
for one versed in woodcraft to find his way out of 
a great forest and into the homes of civilization; or 
for the mariner with his compass to steer his course 
over the trackless sea. We can all follow where the 
Pathfinders lead. That was a beautiful character of 
Cooper's, "The Pathfinder'' or old "Leather Stocking." 
with his unerring judgment of men and nature; 
always pushing out beyond the outposts of civiliza- 
tion, whether that was in the forests of New York, 
along the shores of the northern lakes or on the bound- 
less prairies of the great West! And there are such 
men in the profession of medicine-leaders whose 
look is ever forward-and behind whom follow the 
great mass of the profession: many times ignorant of 
THE PATHFINDERS 3 
the hard work and sufferings and triumphs of him 
who was the pioneer along a rough and rugged road, 
now smoothed for the easy going of the less laborious 
ones. I would not have you understand that the work 
of the artisan is less honorable than that of the artist 
who plans the beautiful structure. Both are alike 
praiseworthy; and while it is given to a few to be 
leaders of men, yet we may all be workers. 
"And departing leave behind us 
Footprints in the sands of time." 
The poetess Ella Wheeler Wilcox has written: 
There are two kinds of people on earth to-day, 
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say. 
Not a sinner and saint for ' tis well understood 
The good are half bad, and the bad are half good ; 
Not the rich and the poor, for to count a man's wealth 
You must first know the state of his conscience and health ; 
Not the humble and proud, for in life's little span, 
Who puts on vain airs is not counted a man : 
Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years 
Bring each man his laughter and each man his tears. 
No, the two kinds of people on earth I mean, 
Are the people who lift and the people who lean. 
Wherever you go, you will find the world's masses 
Are always divided in just these two classes. 
And, oddly enough, you will find, too, I wean, 
There is only one lifter to twenty who lean. 
The dead level of mediocrity we may all attain; it 
is' the floor upon which we were born and upon which 
most of us will fret and work out our earthly exist- 
ence. We are the artisans who do the drudgery of 
the world, and I would not complain of mediocrity, for 
to the many, to the artisans, must the world look for the 
accomplishment of its vast problem of labor. Though 
we may belong to this class, let us love our work. If 
you do not love this profession you have chosen-love 
it enough to give your life enthusiastically to it, then 
let me urge you now to give it up, before it is too late, 
and find something to do which will command all the 
love and energy of your souls. 
Enthusiasm, fanaticism if you will, moves the world. 
The enthusiasts are the Pathfinders for the world. 4 
"Youth without fire leads to an old age without 
warmth." Then while the warm blood of youth per- 
meates your hearts, plunge headlong into your work. 
"Whatsoever your hands find to do, do it with all your 
might," and thus only may you hope to attain to an 
old age wTarmed by the thought of a life well spent. 
He who is without enthusiasm in his calling is a fin- 
ished being, and is simply waiting for the inevitable, 
which shall take him over to the great majority. 
I do not propose to go over the whole field of med- 
icine and give you an outline of all its leaders, but to 
call your attention to a few of the men who have led 
us into the broad fields and green pastures of modern 
medical knowledge. 
It has not been many years since the practice of 
surgery meant great agony to the patient. He had to 
be held, while the sharp steel severed nerve and mus- 
cle and bone. Think of the awful suffering of the 
wounded who had to have an extremity amputated, or 
a dislocated one restored to place! Think of the 
dreadful agony of maternity! And all these pains- 
alleviated by a few whiffs of chloroform or ether! 
My friend, Dr. Ghent, of Texas, tells of a woman 
who was a patient of his under these trying circum- 
stances for her fifteenth time. He administered 
chloroform, and when she came to herself and found 
a lovely little boy in her arms burst into tears. She 
was so sorry that she could not go back and have 
them all over again under the benign influence of this 
God-given pain destroyer. 
Yet the production of anesthesia for surgical oper- 
ations we owe to an obscure country doctor in the 
backwoods of Georgia, Dr. Crawford W. Long. The 
pains of surgery and maternity annihilated and all 
things made possible to the surgeon by his ability to 
do thoroughly and without shock to the patient any- 
thing operative which should be found necessary! 
CRAWFORD W. LONG. 
In the brief time allotted to this address I can not 5 
go into all the details of the ether controversy. Dr. 
Luther H. Grandy, of Atlanta, Ga., in an article pub- 
lished in the Virginia Medical Monthly for October, 
1893, gives its details. From the papers before him, 
supported by sworn testimony of those who witnessed 
the operation, it is clearly proven that Dr. Crawford 
VV. Long removed a tumor from the neck of Mr. 
eJames Venable while anesthetized with ether on 
March 30, 1842. Dr. Long's ledger is produced and 
from it an extract is taken which show's Mr. Venable's 
bill for 1842, and reads as foliow's: 
JAMES VENABLE, Dr. 
Jan. 28, Sulphuric ether 80.25 
March 30, Ether and excising tumor .... 2.00 
May 13, Sulphuric ether 25 
June 6, Excising tumor 2.00 
Dr. Long, and later on Dr. J. Marion Sims, pub- 
lished the details of this operation. 
On July 3, 1842, Dr. Long amputated the toes of a 
negro boy for disease, doing the operation under 
ether anesthesia. 
On Sept. 9, 1843, he extirpated a tumor from the 
head of Mary Vincent. 
On Jan. 8, 1845, he amputated two fingers of a 
negro boy; two witnesses state that one finger was 
removed while the negro was anesthetized, and the 
other one when he was awake, just to show the 
bystanders that anesthesia was possible. 
Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Boston, gave ether for Dr. 
J. C. Warren in the Massachusetts General Hospital 
on Oct. 16, 1846. This was in a public hospital and 
was heralded over the world by the profession at once, 
and ether was soon in universal use. 
While it is true that the young village doctor of 
Jefferson, Ga., was the first to use ether for the pain- 
less performance of surgical operations, he did not 
publish the fact until after Morton and Warren had 
written of their work. Priority of work lies with 
Crawford W. Long, priority of publication with Mor- 
ton. Both deserve praise and honor. The timidity 6 
and retired, obscure position of the young country 
doctor prevented him from publishing his discovery 
to the world, but it was known to his neighbors and 
friends. 
Boston, Mass., has erected a monument to Morton. 
One stands in Paris commemorating the discovery of 
the unknown country doctor in the backwoods of 
Georgia, and the State of Georgia has decided to 
place his statue in the hall of the immortals at Wash- 
ington, D. C. 
At a later period chloroform supplanted ether in 
many surgical operations and the profession is largely 
indebted to Sir James Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh, 
Scotland for popalarizing its use. 
Recently there was gathered to his father's house 
and to " Our Father's house " another man who lived 
and died in a small town in the mountains of Georgia, 
and whose name will go sounding down the corridors 
of time with honor, 
ROBERT BATTEY. 
Dr. Battey's operation has been merged into Tait's, 
but he deserves great honor and praise for his bravery 
in devising an operation for the relief of suffering 
women. He was as modest as he was gentle and 
brave, and to know him was to love him for his 
personality. 
The profession was forty years learning the lessons 
Bernutz and Goupil tried to teach them, and to 
LAWSON TAIT. 
is due the credit of compelling it to recognize the 
value of their teachings. They uncovered for us the 
pathology of certain diseases, and later Neisser and 
Noeggarath taught us their etiology, and as long as 
time shall last these men will stand out among the 
Pathfinders of this generation which has furnished so 
many leaders. 
Pasteur, by his investigations, ascertained that fer- 
n was produced by living microorganisms, 
PASTEUR. 7 
and that chicken cholera was an infectious disease 
and could be prevented by vaccinating the flocks with 
an attenuated virus. He also demonstrated that 
pebrine, a disease of silk worms, which was destroy- 
ing the silk industry of France, was microbic and 
contagious, and hence preventable. He applied the 
same enthusiasm to his effort to discover the cause of 
anthrax, as it affected sheep. He found the source of 
the disease, cultivated the germs, attenuated them, 
and by using the weakened germs and their ptomaines 
protected the flocks of France from destruction. 
Following up his idea for vaccination for infectious 
diseases, he has saved many lives from that frightful 
malady, hydrophobia; and the artisans in the profes- 
sion have but followed Pasteur's lead in all the work 
which has led up to the antitoxins of diphtheria, pneu- 
monia and other contagious diseases. 
LISTER. 
Resting back on Pasteur's work on the cause of fer- 
mentation lies the source of the inspiration which 
tilled the soul of Joseph Lister of Edinburgh, and lead 
him to the experiment which culminated in the 
triumphs of modem antiseptic and aseptic surgery. 
We call the details of modern surgical work Lister- 
ism, and correctly we do it, for Sir Joseph was the 
Pathfinder who led the way, when all the world was 
buried in the darkness of ignorance. The fact that 
we may to-day invade, with impunity, any organ of the 
human body; that thousands of lives are annually 
saved, that suffering has been lessened, is all due to 
the labors of these two men; first Pasteur, then Sir 
Joseph Lister. When the profession fairly learned 
that suppuration was not "laudable," that surgical in- 
flammation was preventible, and that it was produced 
by microorganisms, then the pathway was opened for 
the hunt for the causes of those diseases which were 
not surgical. And one by one they have yielded up 
their secrets to the keen eye of the microscopist, aided 
by Koch and his method of staining tissues to be ex- 8 
amined. Robert Koch became a Pathfinder, and 
when in 1882, he announced that he had discovered 
the cause of tuberculosis, the world fairly went wild. 
Since then, what mighty strides have been made in 
uncovering the sources of many of the scourges which 
afflict mankind! Consumption, typhoid fever, diph- 
theria, yellow fever, cholera, leprosy, the infectious 
diseases, puerperal fever, tetanus, all inflammatory dis- 
eases, et id genus omne! Malaria has recently yielded 
its hematozoon to the labors of Laveran, and we pre- 
dict that the infecting microbe of each of the con- 
tagious diseases will be isolated before many years, 
and all this work, and all the lives saved by modern 
aseptic and antiseptic surgery, have been made possi- 
ble by the enthusiasm of Pasteur, the loving, devoted 
Frenchman, and of Sir Joseph Lister, the laborious 
Scotchman. 
In the early part of this century, there lived in the 
backwoods of Kentucky, an obscure practitioner who 
was as brave as Julius Caesar; a man who had 
"courage of his convictions," who dared to lead where, 
for long years no man was brave enough to follow. 
And from the pioneer work of that country doctor in 
the little Kentucky village, has grown up a host of 
ovariotomists; wherever the operation of ovariotomy 
is performed and a woman's life saved, there is erected 
a monument to the name and memory of Ephraim 
McDowell, the Pathfinder in the field of abdominal 
surgery. All honor to the obscure, brave and un- 
daunted country doctor in the wilds of Kentucky! 
And yet, while living, he was abused and maligned as 
a murderer. When dead, the whole world of medicine 
ancEsurgery honor his memory. 
MC DOWELL. 
SENN. 
Less than fifty years ago, there was born in a can- 
ton in Switzerland a little boy, his parents brought 
him to this country, and he grew up to robust man- 
hood in the west; secured a good English educa- 9 
*tion, struggled hard with poverty to secure his medi- 
•cal degree; obtained it with honor, and became an 
interne in the Cook County Hospital of Chicago, Illi- 
nois. A few years ago he took up the suggestion 
Sims made in 1878, and on dogs demonstrated 
that abdominal section, ligature of bleeding vessels 
.and suture of wounded viscera, was not only feasible, 
but entirely practicable. After a great deal of pains- 
taking work and careful experimentation he laid be- 
fore the professional world the result of his work. 
To-day the labors of Nicholas Senn are bearing fruit 
the world over, and while it is possible that in certain 
-cases the Murphy button may supplant the decalcified 
bone plates in the intestinal surgery of the future, yet 
for all time, Nicholas Senn has written his name on the 
.surgical history of the world. And whenever in the 
future, human life is placed in jeopardy, by wounds 
of internal organs, whether on the battle field or in 
the street brawl, and is saved by either of these or any 
•other device, that life will be a monument, first to 
Sims for suggesting it, and next to Senn for showing 
the world how to do it. 
The warm hearted friend, the enthusiastic, laborious 
physician, the brilliant operator and orator, the gen- 
erous donator to the profession of the largest private 
medical library in the world, Nicholas Senn, will go 
down to posterity as the Pathfinder in intestinal sur- 
gery. 
HAIG. 
And we venture to place another man in this cate- 
gory of Pathfinders. When the profession realizes 
that all the cases of migraine or sick headache, dia- 
betes, many of chronic Bright's disease, the cases of 
:so-called idiopathic epilepsy, Raynaud's disease, the 
■cases of so-called neurasthenia and hysteria, all cases 
of mental depression and consequent suicide, many of 
the forms of neuritis and the neuralgias and many of 
the skin diseases, as well as all forms of rheumatism 
.and gout, are but expressions of that dreadful poison 10 
which each of us make every day and hour, viz., uric? 
acid; I say, when we realize that all this mass of suf- 
fering, probably more than from all other causes put 
together, is produced by poison of endogenous manu- 
facture, we will have cause to be thankful that per- 
sonal suffering, with frequent attacks of sick headache, 
drove Alexander Haig, of London, to investigate uric- 
acid and its protean manifestations. 
Future generations will be freed from much suffer- 
ing by following in the pathway Haig has cut out for 
us in the dark field of preventable human suffering. 
SIMS. 
In a little village in South Carolina, in 1836, a young- 
man hung out his shingle for the purpose of practicing 
medicine. In a month or two the leading man of the 
village called on him and said: "Marion, have you 
had a case yet?" being answered in the negative, he 
was told to go up to the man's house, that the baby 
was ill. The young doctor went and found a very 
sick child. He thought the child had cholera infan- 
tum; told the family to send to his office in one hour 
and he would have the medicine ready. To his office 
he went, and got down from his bookshelf " Eberle 
on Children," the text-book of that day, and began to 
read up on cholera infantum. As the time drew near 
for Jennie to oome for the medicine he was no more 
enlightened than when he began to read. One pecu- 
liarity of Eberle's bkoo was, that there was a prescrip- 
tion on nearly every page. Well, in the young man's 
bewilderment he did not know what better he could 
do than to fill the first prescription, and he did it. In 
after years I heard him tell about it, and he remarked 
that " he turned a page on that baby every day. and 
filled the next prescription." When he got along 
toward the end of his prescriptions, the baby was 
ready to be transplanted as a rosebud to paradise, but 
the doctor did not know it. He had never seen death. 
He had heard the best of lectures, but had never seen 
sickness; there was no clinical teaching of medicine 11 
then. He paid a final visit to the child, and while 
sitting beside it and watching the little sufferer, sud- 
denly it stopped breathing. Immediately the doctor 
picked the baby up, lowered its head, and lifting its 
legs in the air shook it, thinking the child had fainted 
and that he ■would thus get some blood into its brain 
and revive it. The old woman, who had come in to 
see the child and incidentally to size up the young 
doctor, placed her hand on his shoulder and said, 
" Doctor, you need not shake that baby; it is dead!" 
It was a pitiful sight to see the young village doctor 
who had never seen sickness and death, called to pre- 
scribe for a sick child; pitiful to see him go to his 
books and after an hour's reading, fill the first pre- 
scription; pitiful to see this doctor "turn a page on 
that baby every day;" sadder to see him stand by the 
child's dying couch and utterly fail to realize that the 
icy fingers of the grim monster were laying their 
relentless grasp on its heart strings; and sadder still, 
as the fleeting breath suddenly ceases, to see him 
raise it up, lower its head and shake it, in a vain 
endeavor to shake the blood into its lifeless brain; 
and pitiful to hear the old woman, who had no faith 
in young doctors, say, " Doctor, you need not shake 
that baby; it is dead." What more pitiful sight than 
this? He w'ho goes forth to save life, utterly unac- 
quainted with death! 
See this village doctor again. An accident to a 
woman suddenly reveals to his brain the way to suc- 
cessfully relieve suffering motherhood of a fearful 
disease, vesico-vaginal fistula, which had, from all 
time, been incurable, and which renders its victim a 
hopeless recluse, forever shut out from society. See 
him again, when he essays to practice those steps 
which a revelation from heaven has told him is the 
way to relief, fail utterly to accomplish a cure; again 
he tries and again he fails! But he believes first in 
himself, and knows he is right and must succeed. 
Again and again failure follows fast on failure. He 
had gathered together from among his acquaintances 12 
•six women afflicted with this trouble. He supported 
them entirely at his own expense. He inspired these 
women with the belief that he could cure them. At 
first his professional friends assisted him in his oper- 
ations; but at last they gave it up, and making assist- 
ants of his patients, he continued to operate on them; 
and for four years he kept at it, knowing he must suc- 
ceed when he had eliminated all his errors. At last 
about the end of the fourth year, and on one of the 
women, the thirteenth operation success crowned his 
With success came failure of health. 
See him again, broken down in health, go to New 
York to recover it and to tell the story of his success- 
ful work in the relief of the surgical diseases of women. 
See him thus broken in health, and after showing the 
profession in NewT York how to do this work, rejected 
by this profession and the very men to whom he had 
loaned his instruments. See him struggling with 
poverty and distress, the spirit all taken out of him 
as he feels in his heart that "Man's inhumanity to 
man makes countless thousands mourn." Alone, with- 
•out money and without friends, in that great city! 
Not only without friends in the profession, where his 
warm heart expected them, but facing their opposition 
and finding it everywhere, he turned! He says his 
condition drove him as near crazy as it was possible 
for him to be and not lose his mind entirely. 
See this enthusiastic, warm-hearted man, broken in 
health, in spirits and in purse; persecuted by the lead- 
ers of the profession he went to teach, and God knows 
they needed it! See him with his wife and children 
in distress, and his good wife cutting up her new 
dresses to make her children look respectable at 
school! But while in the depth of despair he found 
a friend at last. It is said, you know, that the darkest 
hour is just before dawn. And whom do you suppose 
that friend was? Henri L. Stewart, a newspaper re- 
porter! Through him he reached the medical profes- 
sion who were not connected with medical colleges, as 
well as those who were, and then the noble women of 13 
New York; and his great enterprise was founded.. 
" The stone which the builders rejected, the same has- 
become the head of the oorner." 
Struggling, in want, rejected by the profession of 
New York, and absolutely given no opportunity to 
show that he could cure a hitherto incurable disease! 
See him in Europe, with all the leading surgeons- 
sitting at his feet, like Saul of Tarsus at the feet of 
Gamaliel! Invited to operate in the hospitals, con- 
gratulated by them on his success, given private cases- 
on which to operate, his name spreading over the 
whole of the old World! Verily, a prophet is not with- 
out honor save in his own country. And w'hile in the- 
midst of these triumphs, on October 18,1861, he writes- 
his brave, devoted wife that he would not say that day 
was the happiest of all the days of his life, but that 
it was the proudest save three others. The first of 
those three other days was the one on which she gave- 
him a rose bud through the garden fence (which rose 
bud he kept to his dying day); the second when she- 
gave him her hand in marriage; and the third, the 
first anniversary of the founding of the Woman's Hos- 
pital of the State of New York. 
From utter failure with the sick child of the village 
tailor, he became the successful and beloved physi- 
cian for the crowned heads of Europe, who were 
glad to decorate him with medals. It is said of' 
him, that there was no capital in the old world in 
which he could not have all the patients he could 
attend to in twenty-four hours after his arrival. And 
to-day, thousands of loving mothers owe their relief' 
from suffering and restoration to the companionship- 
of their kind, to J. Marion Sims! 
While the little village of Lancaster, South Caro- 
lina, claims him, and Montgomery, Alabama, gave- 
him to the wTorld, yet, he belongs to humanity, and 
for all future time, the name of Sims is immortalized. 
Not oidy will suffering and injured motherhood for 
all time owe him a debt of gratitude, but until Sims 
in 1878, advocated before the British Medical Associa- 14 
tion, that all persons wounded in the abdomen should 
have their wounded viscera sewed up, and the bleed- 
ing vessels ligated, surgeons dared not invade the 
peritoneal cavity in this class of injuries. 
This beautiful city has honored herself by erecting 
in her borders a well equipped school of medicine 
named in his honor. The first hospital ever erected 
in the world for the treatment of diseases of women, 
was done by the energy and labors of this man, and 
.stands to-night in the city of New York commemora- 
ting his life and work; and that city has also erected 
a monument in bronze to his memory. It was my 
privilege to know him personally, and a nobler, gen- 
tler, lovelier, braver man never lived than J. Marion 
Sims, the village doctor, the physician for the 
•crowned heads of Europe, the reliever of woman's 
.suffering! All hail to his God-like character and 
beloved memory! Here was a Pathfinder whose life 
and labors you may be proud to emulate, and I com- 
mend him to you as an example in every and any 
walk in life. Through darkest Africa and Asia, over 
the entire continent of America, and from the frozen 
steppes of Russia to the sunny, vine-clad hills of Italy, 
all future generations of women will owe him a debt 
of gratitude. 
Having thus briefly referred to some of the leading 
men of this country, I beg permission, gentlemen of 
the graduated class, to conclude my remarks by the 
briefest allusion to the prospects which are before us. 
The Science and the Art of Medicine are not yet com- 
plete; there are many arduous labors to be performed; 
there are many brilliant triumphs yet to be achieved, 
and I doubt not the several members of this youthful, 
yet brilliant company, will be found in the front rank 
of that grand army who are to-day laboring to advance 
the bounds of our theory and to multiply and perfect 
the resources of our practice. 
To the cultivation of true science, to the alleviation 
of human suffering, to the divine business of going 
.about doing good, and to the leaving of our beloved 15 
profession something richer and better than we found, 
it is the goal toward which we should set our stead- 
fast feet. The accomplishment of these high aims 
implies on our part, a lifetime of laborious days, and 
nights devoid of ease, of unwearied patience, of con- 
stant mental and physical exertion, of utter self-abne- 
gation. The way is rugged, but the reward is sublime!