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THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



Gentlemen : Graduates in Pharmacy : In 

 behalf of the Board of Trustees I beg to present 

 to you their very hearty congratulations. They 

 are very proud of you today, and I trust that 

 in your future career you will give them every 

 cause to continue to be proud of you. 



Wishing to emphasize the fact that 

 there are two young ladies here to-night 

 who have fulfilled all of the conditions 

 necessary to receive their degree, I shall 

 take much pleasure in conferring the 

 same. 



Miss Lawall and Miss O'Connor: By the au- 

 thority of the State of New York conferred upon 

 me as Chairman of the Board of Trustees I now 

 declare that you are Graduates in Pharmacy. 

 (Tremendous applause). 



President Fairchild : 



Ladies and Gentlemen : — I have much 

 pleasure in announcing that Mr. John 

 W. Keller will make the address this 

 evening both to our graduates and to you. 



Music, "Bicycle March," Rogers. 

 Address to Graduates 



By Mr. John W. Keller : 

 Members of the Graduating Class: Ladies 

 and Gentlemen: When the College of Phar- 

 macy of the City of New York did me the hon - 

 or to invite me to make this address I replied, 

 "But I don't know anything about pharmacy." 

 Whereupon, much to my astonishment, Mr. 

 Macmahan of the Trustees, who brought me the 

 invitation, said with great enthusiasm, "You 

 are just the man we want. The one thing we 

 don't want to hear about is Pharmacy." That 

 leaves the field wide open. But you may be as- 

 sured that what I said to Mr. Macmahan is true. 

 I do not know anything about pharmacy. It is 

 not customary that a newspaper man (for that is 

 my business) should acknowledge that he 

 doesn't know anything about everything. On 

 the contrary, it is the custom of modern jour- 

 nalism to pretend, at least, to know everything. 

 But if I had made such a pretense you would 

 readily have found to-night that it was all a pre- 

 tense, and therefore, that there may be no mis- 

 take, I tell you now that my knowledge of 

 pharmacy is confined to a distasteful familiarity 

 with an occassional pill, a condition that is 

 forced upon me by an affectionate but over zeal- 

 ous spouse. The other day I thought I would 

 escape the pill and went out without anybody 

 seeing me. As I walked down Fifth Avenue I 



met my wife who took a pill out of her pocket 

 and said "take it." So you cannot possibly es- 

 cape it. There are men in my business, how- 

 ever, who know more about pharmacy than I 

 do. They have a knowledge of spiritusfrumen- 

 ti at night and bromo seltzer in the morning. 

 (Applause). That is simply astounding and 

 the funniest part of it all is that they write their 

 own prescriptions and get them filled while they 

 fill themselves. I suppose, however, that this 

 is more a matter of the Raines Bill than it per- 

 tains to the College of Pharmacy of the City of 

 New York. I merely mention it as an instance. 

 I do hope, however, that when these young 

 gentlemen become launched well upon life that 

 they will demand a regular doctor's prescription 

 for spiritus frumenti. 



But for all that, the pill stands pre-eminent as 

 the emblem of pharmacy in the minds of the 

 uninformed public. I do not know what these 

 graduates or these gentlemen of «^he Faculty se- 

 lected as their emblem, but in the mind of the 

 general public the pill is the thing. You cannot 

 get away from it. It is the conjunct sign of re- 

 lief for suff'ering humanity and yet so ungrateful 

 is humanity that the pill is always referred to 

 with opprobrium and always meets with animos- 

 ity. It has gone down through the centuries 

 contending against a predjudiced public palate. 



You may coat, you may sugar the dose if you wiU, 

 The taste of the pill will hang round it still. 



Probably the worst thing, however, that was 

 ever said against the pill was related to me the 

 other day by an English doctor. He said he 

 went to see one of his patients, and finding her 

 lavishing upon a lap dog some of the sentiment 

 that she might have given to her children, he 

 said: "Madam, what is the name of your dog?" 

 The reply was, "Pill." Said he, in astonish- 

 ment, "what an odd name for a dog, why call 

 him Pill?" "Oh Doctor," she said, "you 

 should not ask why. I call him Pill because 

 then I know that nobody will want to take him. 



The first performance of the play Romeo and 

 Juliet that I ever saw is still stamped upon my 

 memory because I felt that the Apothecary had 

 been libelled in that production. You will re- 

 member the scene. Romeo is in the streets of 

 Mantua and has just received the news of the 

 supposed death of Juliet. He is looking about 

 for some means to end his own miserable exis- 

 tence when this thought occurs to him. I am 

 not going to read this to you as Romeo would 

 read it, for my Romeo days are done. I am sim- 

 ply going to read it to illustrate to you, if possi- 

 ble, that either Shakespeare libelled the profes- 



