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, Osler and Trudeau have graced this association by their mem- 
bership for nearly half a century. The heroes in the combat against 
yellow fever—Reed, 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—Robert Koch. I do not believe that 
there is, even in the camp of our opponents in this go 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 In- 
perial German Reichsgesundheitsamt, which is the equivalent of the 
institution we are striving for—a federal department of health—K och 
VOL, LXXVII.—26, 
