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.

    93/406 page 77
    Jones succeeded; he held his tongue, he remembered and sought, as best he could, to follow the example of Fowler. He made few enemies and many friends. In the midst of discord he lived in peace. He observed the improvement of conditions in his own city; he saw the American Medical Association grow and exercise its influence for good in bringing together and unifying the profession. Surprising changes had occurred in his own community. Through the local branches of the American Medical Association and many special socie¬ ties which had arisen, medical men in Warwick as else¬ where had been drawn together more closely. Improve¬ ments in methods of transportation had brought the city and country nearer together, and the relations be¬ tween physicians in city and state were far more cor¬ dial than they used to be—simply because the doctors knew one another. As he came to know men as the conscientious practi¬ tioner must know men, the misanthropic doubts of his earlier years began to clear away. As time went on, it was not the selfishness and pettiness and ingratitude of the world that impressed him. It was rather the ker¬ nel of sincerity and idealism and beauty that lay hid¬ den in the majority of human beings, curiously con¬ cealed, often, by the forbidding armour of atavistic fear or suspicion or by the scowl of naive self-con¬ sciousness, but ready in the emergency to manifest itself in acts of love and self-abnegation and heroism. The world was a better world than he had fancied. Twenty-five years passed by. Great changes had taken place in medicine. Through the introduction of procedures diagnostic and therapeutic, based on the application of the fundamental sciences, in particular chemistry and physics, the importance of which Jones
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