Address / by W. Osler ; together with report of proceedings in connexion with the opening of the Winter session, Tuesday, October 26, 1909 ; His Excellency the Hon. Whitelaw Reid in the chair.

  • William Osler
Date:
[1909?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Address / by W. Osler ; together with report of proceedings in connexion with the opening of the Winter session, Tuesday, October 26, 1909 ; His Excellency the Hon. Whitelaw Reid in the chair. 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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    APPENDIX. SPEECH OF LORD SHEFFIELD AT THE DINNER OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE, Oct. 26, 1909. Mr. Chairman,—Though I rise to reply to the toast of the guests, yet I find that all the speeches hitherto, whatever their nominal purpose, have been in support of the work of the School. I shall, therefore, not consider myself irrele- vant if I devote myself principally to the advocacy of the cause of tropical medicine. It is not necessary to insist on the fact that at the present day medicine like all the other useful arts rests more and more on a firm basis of independent scientific study. Formerly doctors inferred the nature of illness from symp- toms, and in spite of great acuteness of observation were more or less reduced to guess work in determining the fundamental facts with which they had to cope. Nowadays the healing art lays its foundations in seemingly remote scientific studies in the worlds of physics, chemistry, and biology. I daresay some of you may remember in that entertaining book Letters of a Self-made Man to his Son how the writer who is in the pork trade of Chicago says that when he began business any fool who could drive a hog into a pen could make his fortune in Chicago, whereas now the profit had to be made out of the hoofs and the bristles, and therefore the writer had sent his son to Harvard in order that he might have a wider, a more generalized, and a more intellec- tual training before he specialized into business activity. So it is with us in dealing with the various activities of modern life, and above all in dealing with that vital and difficult question, the enabling of white men to live and
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