Three Generations

as my father and grandfather were also members of our great profession I thought I would try and look at life as it was since 1846 when my grandfather obtained his qualificationi of L.R.C.S. in Edinibuirgh, inci(denltally he was Presi(lent of this Society in 187576. During that early period what great names were brought before the students. Moses, the first great doctor in Egypt, laid down laws of health and made the Israelites follow a code of regulations for their cleanliness and well-being which preserved them in health for forty years wandering in the wilderness. Probably segregation of the leper, often referred to in Leviticus, was the first great feat of preventive medicine. Hippocrates died over two thousand years ago, but his solemn oath which his students took to respect their teachers as a father, to share knowledge freely, to behave with stainless honour, and never to divulge a secret learned in the sickroom, still remains. Galen was born in A.D. 130. He gathered together all the safest teaching of those who had gone before him and added to these the results of his own observations. For a thousand years the teaching of Galen was all that Europe had to go upon in the science of curing disease. About fourteen hundred years later William Harvey appeared on the scene and it was his great mind that discovered the circulation of the blood and laid the real foundation 129