PROFESSOR HAMILTON. 



OVER twenty years ago — I remember it as yesterday — a 

 wave of personal excitement passed over the Aberdeen 

 Medical School. Nothing much had happened ; it was only 

 that the Students of the Fourth Year (in those days the last of 

 the curriculum) had petitioned the University Court against 

 including Pathology in the Final Professional Examination. 

 Pathology, as a subject by itself, was then new ; Professor 

 Hamilton was then the new Professor. The students of 

 Aberdeen, no more then than now, desired to shirk work ; but 

 it was the end of a long course not yet re-adapted, and many 

 had begun it before a Pathology Chair was established. The 

 dispute was very keen ; it even affected old personal friendships ; 

 but the Court — it was in Professor Bain's first Rectorship — 

 went with the students, and against the new Professor. Who 

 raised the question, I never knew ; but it made all the world 

 talk of Pathology, and of its Professor. 



Does any student in these luxuriant days know what went to 

 the making of the splendid department he now works in ? 

 Will he look back with me and picture the hard beginnings of 

 the New Prophet, the days in the wilderness, the triumphant 

 personal energy that, day in, day out, unfaltering, unfailing, 

 planned, and worked, and developed, and taught, until, like the 

 pointed arch of a Cathedral, the new temple of a new science 

 was reared, a fit sanctuary for our worship ? It is not easy to 



