"Tu recte vivis si curas esse quod audis; Neve putes alium sapiente bonoque beatum." [You are living right if you take care to be what people say you are. Do not imagine that any one who is really happy is other than wise and good.] 66 Quod ipse sis, non quod habearis, interest."-PUBLIUS SYRUS. [The question is what you are, not what you are thought to be.] "May you so raise your character, that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt for the advantage it shall receive by your example."-LORD HALIFAX. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS * I HAVE felt that the first graduation of the youngest of the medical schools might very well be occupied with the consideration of the place of the medical profession in history. We are rather apt in the modern time to neglect the lessons of history and, above all, of the history of science, first because it is not always easy to get definite information with regard to it, and secondly and mainly because we are likely to imagine that scientific and medical history can mean very little for us. In America particularly we have neglected the history of medicine and it has been one of the definite efforts at Fordham University School of Medicine to renew interest in this subject. It is entirely too important to be neglected and it has valuable lessons for all generations, but especially for a generation so occupied with itself, that it does not properly consider the claims of the past to recognition for fine work accomplished, and for the exhibition of some of the best qualities of the human intellect in the pursuit of scientific and practical medical knowledge in previous generations. * This was the address to the graduates at the First Commencement of the Fordham University School of Medicine, June 9, 1909. At the earliest dawn of history we find institutions called temples in which men were being treated for their ailments. Those who treated them we have been accustomed to speak of as priests. And such they were, since their functions included the direction of religious services. These religious services, however, were not the exercises of religion as we know them now, but were special services meant to propitiate certain gods who were supposed to rule over health and disease. There were other kinds of temples besides these. We still talk of temples of justice meaning our law courts, and our phrase comes from an older time when people went to have their differences of opinion adjudicated by men who conducted the services of praise and prayer for particular deities who were supposed to mete out justice to men, but the temple attendants were at the same time expert in deciding causes, knowing right and wrong, wise in declaring how justice should be done. These early temples, then, in which the ailing were treated and over which experts in disease and its treatment presided, were not temples in our modern sense, but were much like hospitals as we know them now. They would remind us of the hospitals conducted by religious orders, trained to care for the illnesses of mankind and yet deeply interested in the worship of God. Human institutions are never so different from one another, even in spite of long distance of time or place, as they are usually presumed to be. Men and women have not changed in all the period of human history that we know, and their modes and ways of life often have a startling similarity if we but find the key for the significance of customs that seem to be very different. These temples of the gods of health and of disease, then, were places where patients congregated and men studied diseases for generations, and passed on their knowledge from one to another, and accumulated information, and elaborated theories, and came to conclusions, often on insufficient premises, and did many other things that we are doing at the present time. The medical profession is directly descended from these institutions. They are among the oldest that we know of in human history. These special temples are only a little less ancient than other forms of temples if, indeed, they were not the first to be founded, for man's first most clamorous reason for appeal to the gods has ever been himself and his own health. With the reception of your diplomas this evening you now belong to what is therefore probably the oldest profession in the world. In welcoming you into it let me call your attention particularly to the fact that the history of our profession can be traced back to the very beginning of the course of time, for as long as we have any account of men's actions in an organized social order. |