well, also, at the end of a paper to make a summary of your conclusions, so that there may be crystallized from your paper the principal conclusions that you have been led to. Always try to express yourself clearly. Never try to use fine language; write plainly and simply so that anybody may understand it. When I see a paper written by a man whose former papers have been marked by clearness and good sense, I always read it. You soon learn to "size up" the writers of papers and books.

It has been a great pleasure to me, gentlemen, to meet you this evening. I hope I have opened your eyes to the vast fields of medical bibliography in which you may roam at will; have shown you the means, the methods, and the great labor which your teachers and the writers of the books you study and often admire are compelled to undertake and find delight in; have exhibited to you the methods by which you can make your own work and your own reading valuable, because it is properly recorded and then made available by proper indexing; and, above all, have stimulated you to do the best work in your power and to add to your at first scanty knowledge, to the end that you may grow better, wiser, and abler men and make that larger knowledge available for the relief of human suffering and the prolongation of human life.

Bronze statue of Samuel D. Gross in the Smithsonian Park, Washington, D. C. The building in the background is the Army Medical Museum

ADDRESS AT THE UNVEILING
OF THE STATUE OF THE LATE
PROFESSOR SAMUEL D. GROSS, M.D.,
WASHINGTON, D. C., MAY 5, 1897.*

FELLOWS OF THE AMERICAN SURGICAL ASSOCIATION, MEMBERS OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE JEFFERSON MEDICAL COLLEGE, AND FRIENDS:

G

O with me, your spokesman, to-day to the Woodlands Cemetery, that "God's Acre" or "Court of Peace," as the Germans so poetically call it,-which holds the dust of so many of the best dead of Philadelphia. Upon an urn there treasured you will read the following:

IN MEMORIAM.

Within this urn lie the ashes of

SAMUEL D. GROSS,

A Master in Surgery.

His life, which neared the extreme limits of the Psalmist, was one unbroken process of laborious years.

He filled chairs in four Medical Colleges, in as many States of the Union, and added lustre to them all.

He recast Surgical Science, as taught in North America, formulated

* Reprinted from the Transactions of the American Surgical Association, 1897.

The statue, in bronze, was erected by the American Surgical Association, the Alumni Association of the Jefferson Medical College and other friends of Professor Gross.

anew its principles, enlarged its domain, added to its art, and imparted fresh impetus to its study.

He composed many Books and among them

A SYSTEM OF SURGERY,

which is read in different tongues, wherever the Healing Art is practised.

With a great intellect, carefully trained and balanced, he aimed with undivided zeal at the noble end of lessening human suffering and lengthening human life, and so rose to the highest position yet attained in science by any of his countrymen.

Resolute in truth, he had no fear; he was both tolerant and charitable. Living in enlightened fellowship with all laborers in the world of Science, he was greatly honored by the learned in foreign lands, and deeply loved at home.

Behind the Veil of This Life There is a Mystery Which He

Penetrated on the

SIXTH DAY OF MAY, 1884.

HIS MEMORY

Shall exhort and his Example shall encourage and persuade those who come after him to emulate deeds which, great in themselves, were all crowned by the milk-white flower of

A STAINLESS LIFE.

Who and what was the man of whom this was said?

Samuel David Gross was born near Easton, Pennsylvania, July 8, 1805, and died in Philadelphia May 6, 1884, having nearly completed his seventy-ninth year.

His early years, under the wise training of a good mother, to whose memory he rightly pays just tribute, were spent amid the rustic labors and healthful pleasures of a Pennsylvania farm. This gave him a strong and vigorous body, without which he never could have performed a tithe of the labor which pre-eminently distinguished his long life. Before he was six years old he determined to be a surgeon, and early in his professional studies to be a teacher. Yet when he was fifteen he knew scarcely any English. Brought up among