A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH 377 



bers are considered a medical trust. Yet it is in the ranks of this very 

 American Medical Association that are found the greatest number of 

 unselfish devotees to preventive and curative medicine. It is within 

 this association that are found the men who have added the greatest 

 glory to the medical and scientific reputation of this country. Amer- 

 ica's greatest surgeons — Marion Simms, Gross, Sayer, O'Dwyer, Bull 

 — were members of this association. McBurney, Jacobi, Stephen Smith, 

 Welch, Osier and Trudeau have graced this association by their mem- 

 bership for nearly half a century. The heroes in the combat against 

 yellow fever — Eeed, Lazare and the hundred of others who have de- 

 voted their best energies and knowledge and often sacrificed their lives 

 for the sake of medical science — were members of the American Medical 

 Association. 



One of the most illustrious members of the American Medical As- 

 sociation is its former president, Col. William C. Gorgas, of the U. S. 

 Army, chief sanitary officer at Panama, an adherent to the regular 

 school. It is thanks to the genius, the scientific and thorough medical 

 training of Dr. Gorgas that the formerly deadly Isthmus of Panama 

 has now become as sanitary a region as any. A great patriotic enter- 

 prise, important to commerce and the welfare of nations, was made pos- 

 sible by this man. He has labored and is constantly laboring for the 

 establishment of a federal department of health because he knows the 

 inestimable benefit which such a department would bestow upon the 

 nation. 



Whatever advance has been made in medical science in America or 

 in Europe has been made by scientifically trained men or by physi- 

 cians not without but within the ranks of the regular profession. The 

 greatest benefactors of mankind are those who diminish disease by 

 prevention and cure. As another illustrious example of medical bene- 

 factors, may I be permitted to cite that great trinity of scientific giants 

 who through their labors have accomplished so much in reducing dis- 

 ease and lessening human misery in all parts of the globe? They are 

 Pasteur of France, Lister of England and Koch of Germany; all of 

 them aided their governments by direct participation in the govern- 

 mental health departments. We are still mourning the death of per- 

 haps the greatest of the three — Eobert Koch. I do not believe that 

 there is, even in the camp of our opponents in this so wrongly called 

 ".League for Medical Freedom," a single intelligent individual who 

 will deny the inestimable benefits which Koch has bestowed upon man- 

 kind through his discovery of the germs of tuberculosis, of cholera, of 

 the spores of anthrax, of tuberculin, and through his many other 

 equally important scientific labors. Yet, had it not been for the Im- 

 perial German Eeichsgesundheitsamt, which is the equivalent of the 

 institution we are striving for — a federal department of health — Koch 

 vol. lxxvii. — 26. 



