Osler and other papers / by William Sydney Thayer.

  • William Sydney Thayer
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Osler and other papers / by William Sydney Thayer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/406 page 42
    IV THE HEART OF THE LIBRARY 1 Earth, also, has its immortalities; the immortality of inheritance; the immortality of repute; and that other, surer immortality which lies in the transmission through generations of the beneficent influence of a noble life. The memory of the man may perish; his influence can never die. The message that was his is carried on through the years, hidden though it may be from the consciousness of mankind; mute but quickening. Yet the familiar and profound truth that in this life it is deeds and not words that count, seems sometimes, a paradox. For ’tis so easy, today, by voice or image or written character to impress one’s name on the public conscience, that to the myopic masses, the word seems all powerful. To the initiated, however, the true significance of a man’s words, as they are uttered, is clear only when one may look in his eyes. Even in life the word, “ unless the deed go with it,” is ephemeral. Empty words are soon forgotten. After death ’tis strange how quickly the word and the speaker pass out of memory. Sterile seeds perish in the womb of time. The unwritten message of man endures only when it is a message and not a mere sound. Books are men’s messengers. They alone preserve, through a precarious existence, the name of the many; and it is not unhappy that the life of the arid pulp of the average product 1 An address on the occasion of the dedication of the Osier Library. From The Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1929, XXI, 1-4.
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