President's Address

THE RELATIVE INFLUENCE OF LAW, RELIGION, AND MEDICINE ON THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE

JAMES F. PERCY, A.M., M.D., F.A.C.S.

GALESBURG, ILLINOIS

Those of you who believed that it was better for us not to try to hold our meeting this year, must feel gratified at the attendance tonight in spite of the appallingly unusual conditions which seemed to make its postponement reasonable and even imperative. In the absence of a full expression from all the Fellows as to the wisdom of holding this meeting, your officers, elected for the year 1918, to whom you had entrusted the interests of the Association, were unwilling that the records should show that they had, in any measure, been derelict in keeping its affairs in a state of healthy activity. I am sure, also, that those of you who have come to this meeting, and have also contributed to the program, will experience a delightful sense of loyalty and a sincere feeling of proprietary interest in this annual gathering, devoted, as it is, to the development and furtherance of scientific surgery, because of the unusual difficulties in holding a meeting this year.

I would not be altogether just did I not express my personal appreciation and also your sense of indebtedness to our two good friends, Dr. Abbott and Dr. Beck, for what they have done to insure the success and profit of this meeting for us all. And then I want to tell you again, as simply and as earnestly as I can, how much I appreciate the generous spirit in you all which made it possible for me to serve as your presiding officer at this time. As the years have come and gone since you were good enough to include me among your number, I have, I know, grown with you and because of you, and I have also felt the inspiration that these conferences have brought to each of us. Now to stand here as your chief officer for this fateful year brings a kind of satisfaction that can not be adequately expressed by words. But I want to say more than this: I shall continue to look upon this Association as the place where I can bring the fruits of whatever shall come to me in the way of improvement in myself as a man, and also of whatever success I may yet attain in our beneficent art and science of surgery.

I have no recommendations to make as to the lines that we should follow in order to develop ourselves as we express our lines of effort in the further development of surgery; indeed, it would be most difficult in this year of tremendous change along all the avenues of human thought and effort. No one can predict either in science or in government what is just before us. But, I am sure, we can all feel that something different is impending; that the road toward the goal for man and the nation that he is proud to call his own, is widening; and that every effort that he may make now will have back of it the science of arrangement, which will result in a developing form of unhampered progress. May I beg your indulgence, then, if I do not attempt in this address to try to

indicate what some of these impending changes might be, attractive as that subject at this time could be made. Let me, rather, go over with you some of the things that have grown out of former world conflicts and indicate, as well as I can, the relative influences in the human family that the three so-called learned professions,-Law, Religion and Medicine,have had on the progress of the human race. My purpose in choosing this subject for your consideration is that we may know, in a new light perhaps, that medicine has been actually guided by traditions that have made possible, not only its own beneficent development, but also, in no small measure, that of every other department of human endeavor that had for its purpose the greatest ultimate good of the children of men. Before taking up the main theme of my discussion, however, permit me to approach it again from a little different angle.

I am especially impressed with the unusual significance of this meeting. The war has ended. I am not qualified either to discuss the tremendous human currents that caused it to flame up or to predict what its final effect will be on the governments which the peoples of the world will now create in order to minimize its effects or to profit by its hellish discipline. But I believe that for all scientific endeavor there are in view consequences that force us, as we sit here tonight, to become actors in a new drama. The acme of medical and surgical attainment has come in your day and mine. Modern Medicine and Surgery, try to state it otherwise as we may, began with Pasteur and Lister. They made it possible for us to study the wonderful processes of living pathology in a way denied our confreres before our time. But Medicine and Surgery have never before known the same magnitude of opportunity to delve into and study disorganized brain and nerve, bone and muscle, tendon

or synovial membrane, the joints or the pleura and lung, heart, peritoneum and blood, to say nothing of the neurofunctional diseases, as this cruel war has provided. Thousands of men trained in the best that has resulted in medical education from the marvelously constructive brains of the Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, and the Englishman, Joseph Lister, have already received clues that will make, in the days that are already upon us, a new Medicine and a new Surgery. The medical men in the armies in Europe today, as in no armies that have heretofore existed in the history of the world, are well prepared. Will it require any strain on the imagination when I say that the program of this meeting and of all meetings of medical men in the immediate future, either special or general, will have a new note and will offer not only new problems but a new point of view to the old ones?

The geography of Europe has changed in a way that will probably make for the peace and prosperity of the whole world. Men's minds, liberated from the thraldom of a vicious caste system, will respond to the opportunity now given them to delve into the truths of a scientific arrangement of things in government and in the arts of peace. Even Law and Religion, and as well Medicine, will gain a new inspiration and a new freedom and life, for the individual will broaden from the lowest and humblest to the highest and most deserving. The Anglo-Saxon, with his character and his language, and love of truth and freedom, will spread these attributes over the earth. The face of the medical world will have a new aspect, not fundamentally, but actually. Sanitation and preventive medicine, the new physiology which has grown out of the new science of aviation, the search for bacterial destructive antiseptics which will not injure vital structures, the triumphs to be gained by physio

logical chemistry, the unraveling of the subtle phases of the functional neuroses, the practical results that must come from the study of the injuries and wounds due to shot and shell and gas,-the emissaries of frenzied men,-the study of syphilis-these subjects. (and I have not mentioned them all), as they have presented themselves in their newer aspects to thousands of scientific men in our profession, have also been called to the attention of millions of virile, thoughtful civilian soldiers, not only in our own army, but also in the armies of our valiant Allies, giving them a new vision and a more intelligent sympathy with the hopes and the aims of the medical profession of the world. May I ask further, Is it unreasonable to expect that our own country, with its Crosian wealth, its intelligence based as it is on a system of universal popular education as its great foundation-will lead in this scientific medical renaissance? Happily, we are not in the position in which the famous Ambroise Paré found himself in 1564 when he had finished his great treatise on surgery. He there records his confident belief that surgery had reached in his day the summit of its possibilities.

I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, and therefore it is not my purpose to try to indicate in this paper just what lines of advance in medical thought and practice will probably grow out of the years of the next decade. That this great conflict of world forces will change them there can be no question. My purpose, rather, is to direct your attention to the relative relationship in the past of the three great departments of human endeavor-Law, Religion, and Medicine-as they have affected mankind in its development from barbarism until the present. Garrison, in his History of Medicine, quoting A. L. Lowell, says: "It is hardly an exaggeration to summarize the history of four hundred years by saying