Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan.

  • Berkeley Moynihan
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    undismayed by the pestilences which menaced us before Lister forever subjugated our enemies. Lister is indeed Captain of the Men of Life. We, who inherit the glorious legacy of Lister, must not be content merely to enjoy and exploit our incom¬ parable heritage. No great teacher measures his success in contemplation of his own efforts. His greatness lies rather in the work which he inspires others to do, in the tradition not of past accomplishment but of future devotion. Traditions are fostered and increased, not by routine observance of ancient ceremony nor by mute obedience to outworn creed, but by active faith forever seeking new truths and exploring new paths, in con¬ formity with the old spirit and with unchanging devotion to the great ideal of which the tradition is the shrine. There is immortality of the tomb, and immortality of the resurrection. The soul of a great teacher is born again in his pupils. We are Lister’s disciples. What, then, are we to do with his gift to mankind? We use it already to the immense advantage of the individual sufferer; a therapeutic weapon of unapproached perfection, we are making it, and we must continue in increasing degree to make it, far more than that. After the Great War the statesmen of Europe, moved by the highest ideals, sought, not perhaps wholly in vain, to convert the allied victory into lasting peace. The statesman’s ideal is a warless world. War is to end war. Ideals are not so much for capture as for pursuit, and though the statesman may never attain his ideal, yet the happiness and progress of mankind surely depend upon the grim and perhaps end¬ less struggle to reach it. So, too, for us surgery must be regarded as the most powerful weapon of research upon man and animals ever given to our hands; and the end