Introductory address delivered at the opening of the Edinburgh Medical School, ... November, 1873 / [Balfour].

  • Balfour, George William, 1823-1903.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory address delivered at the opening of the Edinburgh Medical School, ... November, 1873 / [Balfour]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    I INTKODUCTOEY ADDRESS. Gentlemen,—Could we recall to earth one of those skiu-clad savages, whose graphic remains are still visible in the caves on the shores of our neighbouring firth, whose kitchen-middens and lacustrine dwellings are yet traceable even nearer home, and who 2000 years and more ago got their precarious living by hunting the stag and the boar in those trackless forests which then occupied the hills whereon our fair city now rests, or by catching the fish or the wildfowl of those lochs which now, as beauteous gardens and fair meadows, surround and adorn our dwellings, we could hardly imagine the wonder and awe with which he would survey the changed scene. But the awe-struck amazement of this ignorant savage at all the wondrous civilization of this nineteenth century, would be as nothing compared with the admiring astonishment with which Hippocrates—the father of our art—could we rouse him from his long slumber, would regard the present state of medicine. A denizen of Greece—in the palmy days of Pericles and Phidias—we must forgive the scornful smile with which he would glance at our paltry architectural imitations, specially at the unfinished counterfeit of that Parthenon which he remembers in all its virgin beauty. Drawing his pallium closer round him as a keen north-easter whistles past, we shall suppose him to find his way into our Infirmary, up the main staircase, and into one of the side-rooms, where he is courteously received by the attending physician and his clinical clerks, who,.mindful of Mr Syme's first axiom—never to look surprised at anything—are politely blind to the scanty raiment of their stranger visitor. Warmed by the genial atmos- phere around him, feeling himself, as it were, at home amid the sick and their surroundings, conscious of his own personal reputa- tion and of the esteem in which his views and his words were held for many hundred years, the venerable gentleman essays to impart a httle clinical instruction in return for the kindness with which he