MEDICINE AS A CAREER FOR EDUCATED

MEN.*

66

"B

EAUTIFUL for situation, the joy of the whole earth," was the description of ancient Jerusalem by its enthusiastic admirer. And surely anyone looking on Pardee Hall would be justified in applying this encomium to Lafayette College. It is a genuine pleasure to me to join with you in your annual festival when your tribes come up to their intellectual Jerusalem, "singing their songs of degrees" as of old. And although the son of another academic mother, I rejoice with you in the prosperity and glories of your noble college. I see around me old men, graduates of the forties, with silvered heads, their paths in life chosen, their duties fulfilled, their lives culminating in honored, cultivated leisure and wide influence, whose achievements are recorded in the history of the world of art, science, literature, language, business, and religion. I see, again, men in middle life, graduates of the sixties and seventies, alert for every opening for the best work in the world's great enterprises. They are in the forefront of the fight against ignorance, vice, and irreligion.

But it is rather to the young men, and especially to you, gentlemen of the graduating class,-who are now taking leave of these classic shades where you have spent the four most blissful and fruitful years of a man's life, to which he ever reverts as the halcyon days of youth-to you that I espe

* The Commencement Address at Lafayette College, June 13, 1893, and (with slight changes) the Phi Beta Kappa Address, Brown University, June 20, 1893.

cially address myself. The joys, the trials, the studies, the achievements of your college life are now, or soon will be, over. The world stands open before you. do?" is the question of questions to you. this question may make or mar you.

"What shall I The decision of

If you decide rightly you will achieve success, honor, happiness, and the final consolation of a life well and nobly spent. If wrongly, your decision may wreck, even hopelessly, a young life full of brilliant promise. You and your fellows in the many colleges of the land who will graduate in this leafy June have on your side youth, with all its potencies. You have a just and laudable ambition. You are ready to work your finger-nails off. You have trained intellects. You are members of the true aristocracy of learning, men of marshalled forces, the hope of the nation, the future natural leaders of thought in public and in private life. What shall you do? "Surely," says Carlyle in his Biography of John Stirling, "the young heroic soul entering on life so opulent, full of sunny hope, of noble valor, and divine intention, is tragical as well as beautiful to us."

It is of equal importance to the community as well as to you that you elect wisely what path you will follow in this busy world. Some of you will enter commercial life, lured possibly by hopes of material reward. Some may be devoted to art, with its æsthetic enjoyments. Some will find in literature the contentment and fame that come to the successful author. Some will devote your lives to the highest human function and service to your fellow-men, in winning them to Christ-like lives and heavenly aspirations. Some will seek the noble profession of the law and will become leaders of the bar and wear the ermine on the bench. Not a few, I hope, will devote yourselves to a scientific career, with, it is true, its ceaseless toil, but also its fascinating investigations, its splendid discoveries, its beneficent inventions.

It is my desire to lay before you some of the rewards, the

possibilities, the attractions of such a scientific life, and to win you to its pursuit, since it has attractions-wonderful attractions-from many sides and for every type of man, excepting always the lazy. I have selected as my topic, therefore, "Medicine as a Career for Educated Men."

I am met at the outset by the query, "Are there not already too many doctors?" Yes; far too many poor doctors, but far too few good ones. Webster's oft-quoted remark that "there is plenty of room at the top" is as true of medicine as of any other profession. In any profession there is always a reserved seat in the front row for a March, a Faraday, a Schliemann, a John Hunter, a Lister, a Virchow, a Pasteur, a Gross. And although no one of you may become the peer of those I have named-and yet why should you not?-still there is always room right next to them for the trained intellects who will make their profession an integral part of their lives and devote themselves earnestly and truly to its pursuit. Never has there been in medicine such a demand for men of the highest type, the deepest insight, the profoundest spirit of investigation. Never have there been so many questions of grave import to the human race awaiting solution. The mighty problems of life and disease and death crowd upon us and await the touch of a master-hand to make the obscure clear, to avert the dire results of accident, to stay the hand of the Angel of Death and say in dominant tones: "Thus far, and no farther."

Medicine is looking to just such well-equipped, thoroughly trained men as you for its champions in this daily fight with death. And if you wish to rise above the dull level of mediocrity it will be to you college men that the renown which is the proper object of a laudable ambition will surely come. President Thwing, in the June "Forum" states that Appleton's "Encyclopædia of American Biography" contains the names of 912 doctors, of whom 473 were college-bred men. The "Medical Record," commenting upon this fact, estimates

⚫that 300,000 men have started out in medicine in this country during the present century. If so, the chance of the ordinary doctor's becoming famous is about one in 300. But if he be a college-bred man it is about one in six. The profession, as I have said, is filled to repletion with poor men and untrained men. What we want is the men fresh from the laboratories of the best colleges, men whose minds are trained in logical methods, who are versed in the "humanities," who possess refinement and culture, who, having eyes and ears, have learned to use them to the best advantage. In that delightful book, "The Gold-headed Cane," Radcliffe-he of the library-visits Mead in his library and says: "As I have grown older, every year of my life has convinced me more and more of the value of the education of the scholar and the gentleman to the thoroughbred physician. Perhaps your friend there (pointing to a volume of Celsus) expresses my meaning better than I can myself when he says that this discipline of the mind, 'quamvis non faciat medicum, aptiorem tamen medicinæ reddit.'"

The signs of the times point to a closer affiliation of colleges and medical schools, which will be equally advantageous to both. Five years ago nearly all the medical schools in this country were two-year schools. Now nearly all have the three-year courses and a few four, and the new Pennsylvania law requires four years of study, of which three shall be in a medical school. This movement in the direction of a more thorough education means that the medical schools desire to offer a curriculum worthy to attract the best educated men. Moreover, the medical schools are endeavoring to adjust their courses so that they will be the natural continuation of the college courses. Without sacrificing the symmetry and completeness of the college curriculum or abridging the studies for the medical degree, their aim is so to adjust the two that they shall be linked together as one complete whole. Thus many of the medical schools are considering what means

can be adopted to draw into affiliation with them the colleges and college men in preference to others. The larger development of the Jefferson Medical College, of the medical departments of Harvard University, of the University of Michigan, of the University of Pennsylvania, and of Johns Hopkins, are evidences of the same wish to win the college men to a medical career. The union of the College of Physicians and Surgeons with Columbia College as its medical department, and the projected absorption of one or more of the Chicago medical schools into the University of Chicago show the same tendency. Moreover, the colleges are looking equally toward the medical schools, as I have pointed out, by the establishment of courses which will naturally lead up to medicine. In Brown University the same movement is actively taking shape through the Brown University Medical Association, and in several universities with medical departments similar steps have already been taken. It is a movement full of promise.

If any of you look forward to medicine as a career you should view it from three different standpoints.

First, on its economic side. This is a matter of no little importance, for every man in this world must earn his living and also naturally looks forward to the support, not only of himself, but of his wife and children in the future. No one should expect in medicine to make a fortune. A few doctors do so, but they are the exception. But every man who enters medicine, if he will be faithful and honest in his work, and a fortiori the more intellectual college man, can be sure of a competence,-nay, more, can be sure that he will enjoy not only the reasonable reward of toil, but be able to lay up sufficient for his own old age and for his family.

Secondly, a much more elevating and attractive side is the philanthropic or humanitarian. The medicine of the future will be chiefly in the direction of that most philanthropic object, the prevention rather than the cure of disease.