In memoriam : Edmund A. Parkes / [Sir William Aitken].

  • William Aitken
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: In memoriam : Edmund A. Parkes / [Sir William Aitken]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Fever, which he delivered to the College of Physicians in 1855, and subsequent Croonian Lectures at the same college in 1871, and notably his address to the British Medical Association when it met in London three years ago. You may well study these, not less for the information contained in them, than as models of composition on professional subjects of the deepest philosophical character, usually considered and rendered too abstruse for easy reading, but which are there made easy. But there is another reason why I bring this lecture in the Lancet to your special notice now. It is because I think we may read and see in it an ideal of Parkes’ own pure and noble life, imbued and impressed, as it ever was, by the dignity and importance of the subject of Hygiene—the subject which he taught here, and the one of all others he was most deeply interested in. You cannot fail to perceive running throughout this lecture the very high ideal he set before himself and before us all. He had, indeed, a very great and abiding sense of responsibility. “ Moral responsibility ” with him was no mere phrase. In his own emphatic words—“ It is an actual obligation which all will have to meet;” and he himself, as we all know, from first to last, did his work with all the thoroughness of which it was capable. Whatever his hand found to do, he did it with all his might and strength of body and mind. Every duty that fell to his lot he did thoroughly and as well as it could be done, always with his whole heart devoted to his work—working “ as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye.” With his finely-balanced mind he worked as if he desired to know all that he could possibly learn in the wide range of medical and sanitary science, so that he might do all that could be done for the relief of human suffering, for the sanitary benefit of the army, the country, and mankind. We know that he passed through a severe course of study as a student, and a thorough practical training for his profession at University College, London, where he afterwards became one of its most distinguished and useful practical teachers as Professor of Clinical Medicine. The subsequent details of his life and works have been more or less fully given in our Aveekly medical journals, therefore I will not now dwell upon them. But if you ask —as the question is often put regarding successful men—“ What was the secret of his success 1 ” I think I may answer that there was no secret with Parkes in this respect; but in accomplishing all he did, several great qualities, no doubt, contributed to it, and upon these I would like to dwell. The first of them is resolution. He clearly set before himself the objects and the aim which characterised the purpose of his life, and which he resolved to achieve.