Charles White, surgeon and obstetrician / by J. George Adami.

  • Adami, J. George (John George), 1862-1926.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Charles White, surgeon and obstetrician / by J. George Adami. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [Reprinted from Medical Library and Historical Journal, March, 1907 ] CHARLES WHITE: SURGEON AND OBSTETRICIAN.* By J. George Adami, M.D., M.R.C.S., F.R.S., Professor of Pathology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. IME and again in these latter days I find my thoughts tracing back, ever more fondly, ever more wistfully, to the home and scenes of boyhood. I take it that this is the case with all of us as middle age makes itself acknowledged, and that more insistently when our way in life leads us “to traverse climes beyond the western main,”' remote from the land of birth, whether to find ourselves— “Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, And Niagara stuns with thundering sound.” or settled at ease “On Torno’s cliffs or Pambamarca’s side.” More insistently also when the links binding the present with the past have been snapped asunder; when, if not rendered waste like “sweet Auburn,” there has come about, however naturally, however inevitably, that through death and dispersal the old home has been broken up; that one can never more revisit it, to live over again with those near and dear the days of old. Gentle, naive, improvident Oliver Goldsmith—licentiate in medicine, as he claimed, by the by, of a foreign university, though rejected by the London Corporation of Surgeons,—was not forty-two, and had been working at the poem for more than two years, distilling into it his heart’s longing, when he published the “Deserted Village.” I claim but a year or two more. It is not therefore approaching senility that impels the mind to call back the scenes and events of childhood, but the ever-present pathos of the thought that those things have gone from us— gone irretrievably. Thus it is that in my own case I find myself time and again picturing a little old-fashioned English parish church, plain enough in all conscience, with no architectural pretensions save an open frame roof of stout Cheshire oaken beams, wrought with *An Address delivered to the McGill University Medical (Students’) Society.