Addresses and other papers / by William Williams Keen.

  • William Williams Keen
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Addresses and other papers / by William Williams Keen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    shall be properly made and permanently recorded in such a manner—best by a modern card-catalogue—as to be ac¬ cessible. It is too often the case that trustees, as I have said, regard their duties and responsibilities at an end when they have taken care of the funds and elected the staff. They may say that, after all, this is their real duty, and that all I have advo¬ cated is medical and surgical, and that the responsibility for it should devolve on the staff, and not on the trustees. I do not take so narrow a view of the duties of trustees. When they have elected a physician or surgeon, if he neglects his duty, it is their business to displace him and fill his place with another man who will attend to his duty, and the duties that I have indicated pertaining to the increase of knowledge as well as of its diffusion are quite as much within their province as it is to see that the funds are invested to the best advantage. The intellectual funds as well as the invested funds must bring in good dividends. If trustees and staff work together for such a purpose and in such a manner, they will create an ideal hospital which will do more good to the patients than any other type of hospital. It will attract the best physicians and surgeons in every com¬ munity, will acquire the best reputation, not only local, but it well may be national, and do the most for the good of science and the benefit of humanity. It may be said that this is an unduly strenuous view of the duties of trustees, that in our father's day and in our own earlier lives no such conditions existed or were contemplated. “I need hardly ask a body like this, said President Roose¬ velt in addressing the Methodists assembled in council, “to remember that the greatness of the fathers becomes to the children a shameful thing if they use it only as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for noble aims. . . . The instruments with which, and the surroundings in which we work have changed immeasurably from what they were in