2 SCIENCE. 
to the occasion to examine some of the pos- 
sible ways of advancing medicine. Permit 
me, then, to lay before you certain sug- 
gestions which my experience as a teacher 
of medical science has brought to my mind. 
Others can deal far better than I with the 
strictly clinical problems. In the course of 
my address I shall have to emphasize cer- 
tain limitations which are detrimental to 
medicine and which progress must step 
over. We must, however, not forget that 
criticism in itself is of slight value, unless 
it guides us to possibilities of progress. 
This interpretation of criticism should pre- 
side throughout our discussion. 
The physician’s work is nota trade in 
which he can perfect his skill once for all, 
but a profession based on learning, without 
interruption, new facts, new methods and 
even totally new ideas. The conversion of 
a student into a medicine doctor is too com- 
monly looked upon as the end of the period 
of learning, but the student ought rather to 
look upon it as a certificate that he is at 
last qualified to learn, with reasonable effi- 
ciency, and, above all, with reasonable se- 
curity as to his learning aright. Routine 
in medical practice is professional degrada- 
tion. 
There is one problem which we must all 
meet, the solution of which we cannot shirk, 
except by the supreme and final cowardice 
of suicide. So long as we live we are giv- 
ing our solution to this problem, the prob- 
lem of conduct, solving it equally by what 
we do and what we do not do, by our ac- 
tivities and our inhibitions. Some men give 
a mean solution, a mere summing-up of 
whims and accidents ; others give the bad 
solution of selfishness, passion or vice. The 
great object of our universities is to aid 
men to reach a noble solution under the 
dominion of wisdom and uprightness. You 
will often hear the assertion that our col- 
leges have one of their most important func- 
tions in the building-up of character. The 
[N. S. Von. X. No: 236. 
college of which this is not true deserves no 
students. But with this assertion is some- 
times coupled the implication that the pro- 
fessional and scientific schools do not exert 
as much influence as the college on charac- 
ter. Such an implication may be excused 
to ignorance, but that would be a sorry 
medical school of which it were true. A 
medical school must develop character as 
well as mind, or else fail to produce grad- 
uates who can solve their problems of pro- 
fessional as well as of personal conduct. 
Conduct presents to us a fourfold aspect : 
a physical, a social, an esthetic and an in- 
tellectual. The physical aspect is that 
which the physicans chiefly deal with, it be- 
ing their work to regulate understandingly 
the doings of the body. To fit men for this 
work is the object of medical education. 
How to acheive this object I will ask you to 
discuss with me presently. The social as- 
pect of conduct, the relation of what the 
individual does in its bearing upon others, 
has endless phases, but there is no pro- 
fession in which the personal social relations 
are so much a part of the necessary profes- 
sional equipment as in the profession of 
medicine. The practitioner must abound 
in conscientiousness, honor and tact, and it. 
is a natural consequence that there exists a 
code of ethics wherever physicians have 
formed associations. The esthetic side of 
conduct, the securing of beautiful things 
because they are beautiful, concerns the 
medical man less, although he pursues the 
art of healing, and healing is really an art, 
a very fine art, as well as a science. The 
intellectual aspect of his own conduct is to 
the physician sovereign over all the rest. 
Medicine is distinctively an intellectual 
occupation. Let this bare schedule suffice 
to emphasize the fact that the physician 
more than men in most occupations needs a 
varied endowment, a broad foundation of 
character and a liberal education. I think 
that physicians as a class are distinguished 
