fession as a whole is worthy of the confidences so freely given. Be careful, even to reticence, of any betrayal of this trust. Better suffer misconception and unmerited blame yourselves than betray your patients.

Be brave men. Your fathers were brave men. When pestilence stalks in the streets and contagion lurks in every chamber of illness, where have the doctors been found? Fleeing from danger with the frighted multitude? Nay, verily. If you wish to find them you must seek in the crowded tenements, in the hospitals, and in the charnel-houses. There you will find them cheerfully tending the sick, facing disease in the midst of its victims, and seeking, even in the bodies of the dead, the knowledge that will make them masters of the plague. Witness Rush in the yellow fever of 1797, Gross in the cholera of 1832, and Haffkine in the bubonic plague of the present time. War has given us many fine examples of personal bravery, but pestilence has bred its quiet heroes who have gone about their daily duty, simply, fearlessly, devotedly. No granite shaft, no enduring brass may mark their last resting-place, but the Recording Angel has dropped a tear, blotting out their faults, and writ their names high in the roll of fame.

In your professional relations, never forget to be charitable. The best patients you will ever have will be the thankful poor, and your hearts will often find a sincere and grateful glance better payment than any gold. In your relations with other physicians, you will find many opportunities for that same brotherly kindness which is so beautiful a characteristic of our guild. Always extend to other physicians and their immediate families the courtesy of faithful attendance without pecuniary return. Avoid the petty jealousies, which, I am sorry to say, not seldom estrange physicians from each other. Always believe the best motive unless you know the worst is present. Never say an unkind word of a brother-doctor

when you can utter a kindly one. Try to be just, even to those who are unjust to you.

Public Life. In most communities, especially in minor towns and villages, the doctor is one of a small circle of educated men. His scientific studies make him familiar with many public problems, especially those concerning sanitation, the water-supply, the prevention of epidemics, the preservation of the public health, the problems of school life, the fostering of a proper athletic indulgence, the management of prisons, the care of the feeble-minded, the insane, the poor. On all of these questions you must make your voices heard in the communities in which you live or else you give them over to others less qualified and only mischief can follow.

No one, perhaps, is more of a leader than the physician in the various philanthropic enterprises of the day. These are closely allied in many respects to the topics just mentioned, and you will be on boards of directors and managers and trustees where you must bring your influence to bear for a wise outlay of charitable gifts and civic appropriations and for harmonizing the antagonistic elements which too often produce discord and confusion. If you combine the qualities which I have sketched for the ideal doctor, you will find that men will easily recognize you as wise leaders whom they will be glad to follow.

My best wish for you is that you may realize in your own lives these characteristics of the ideal physician. It will matter little then whether your life be long or short, for the proper measure of a life is not how long, but how it has been lived, and if you attain to old age, when the hairs whiten and the crow's feet begin to show, when your natural forces are abated, you will then not be alone in the world, but will have honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, and one Friend above all others, the Great Physician. And when you pass from this life into the next, then shall you be greeted not only by this one great Friend, but by many from whose pathway you have plucked the thorns and briars of this earthly life; many

whom, through the devious paths of convalescence, you have led back to perfect health, to home, husband, father, mother, children; and even if you have not been able to stay the hands of the grim reaper, those too will greet you whose last hours you have soothed amid the pangs of death and have helped through the new birth into the heavenly Jerusalem.

ADDRESS AT THE

ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND AT THE CONFERRING OF HONORARY DEGREES AT THE CENTENARY CELEBRATION OF THE GRANTING OF ITS PRESENT CHARTER.*

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N behalf of my American colleagues and myself it gives me great pleasure to return our very hearty thanks for the honor just conferred upon us. We regard it as the highest surgical honor we could receive, for "Praise from Sir Hubert is praise indeed."

Though the Royal College of Surgeons of England has attained a venerable age, it is far from decrepitude. No better evidence of this can be found than the many Members and Fellows who at the call of duty so cheerfully went to the front in South Africa. Foremost among them was your distinguished President, who, though he has reached an age when most men seek repose and slippered ease, responded to his country's call with his customary energy and alacrity. Happily the war is now nearing its end. Apart from any political results in South Africa, it has had two results in which we may well rejoice. It has bound together Great Britain and her colonies in one solid empire; and through the wise statesmanship of the Most Noble the Marquis of Salisbury and His Excellency the American Ambassador has joined Great Britain and America in a firm moral union in which Her Majesty, if not monarch of our persons, is surely Queen of our Hearts.

* Reprinted from the British Medical Journal, August 4, 1900.

We come to you as representatives of four of our great institutions of learning-from Harvard, hoary with the snows of nearly three centuries, to Johns Hopkins, in the lusty youth of less than three decades. As President of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia I represent also the oldest institution in America at all similar to your own, a Corporation which includes surgeons as well as physicians, and which was already in its teens when the Royal College of Surgeons received its present charter.* On behalf of these and of all our medical institutions we bring you our heartiest greetings on this festal occasion, in the name of sound learning and accurate scholarship.

It has been my pleasure in Philadelphia to welcome many of your Fellows, including three of your most distinguished Presidents. Some of you have even swept across the continent in luxurious palace cars in but little over one hundred hours. To show how swift has been our progress and yet how young we are, I need but recall the fact that this College was nearly forty years old before the name of Chicago-now a city of nearly 2,000,000 people-even appeared upon the map, and, when you were founded, beyond the fringe of civilization on the Atlantic coast practically the only inhabitants of the vast region from the Alleghanies to the Golden Gate were the buffalo, the bear, and the savage Indian.

But though so young we come not empty-handed. Three

*The Royal College of Surgeons of England was founded originally in 1540 in the reign of Henry VIII. By a misfortune they lost their charter in 1796. A new one was granted to them in 1800 by George III. In 1900, to celebrate the centenary of the granting of this new charter, they conferred their Honorary Fellowship upon the Prince of Wales (now King Edward VII), Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery (the leaders of the Conservatives and the Liberals), and thirty-two surgeons from various countries in Europe and America. My address was the response on behalf of the American surgeons upon whom the degree was conferred; namely,―J. Collins Warren, of Harvard; Robert F. Weir, of Columbia; William S. Halsted, of Johns Hopkins; and W. W. Keen, of the Jefferson Medical College. [W. W. K., 1905.]