Rest and Exercise

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, It is my privilege and my pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the Medical Staff to the practice and the teaching of the Royal Victoria Hospital on this the opening of a new session. You have chosen Medicine as your life's work. Let me congratulate you on your choice of career though I would remind you that Medicine is not an easy calling. It demands-over and above factual knowledge-judgment, concentration, good humour, tolerance, kindness and tenderness towards human beings and, above all, a deep consciousness of one's obligations and responsibilities to the sick. These are aspects of human behaviour which you must try to cultivate for without them you can never hope to become really good doctors no matter how great your scientific knowledge. Reading textbooks and listening to lectures is not enough. Only by direct contact with human suffering can your pity and charity be stimulated and the virtues I have just mentioned be germinated and in time brought to full growth. If you are interested in humanity you will become good, possibly even a few of you will become great, doctors. Our hospital offers you in the wards and the outpatient departments the opportunity to become so. During your years of attendance at the hospital you will learn a little about many things unheard of when I was a student. In my time we were taught that the saving of life and the easing of pain were two of the chief functions of a doctor. In those days the doctor saved life now and then. Today life saving is a commonplace , thanks to the development of antibiotic drugs, excellent methods of anaesthesia and with them safe surgery to mention only a few of many advances. In spite of the changes over the past thirty years, and they have indeed been great, relief of pain still chiefly interests the patient, and skill in this direction forms an important part of a doctor's life. The sufferer wants action, he is uninterested in theories for, to him, there is no virtue in needless suffering or in submission to misery because the means of succour are withheld through carelessness, lack of knowledge, or for any other reason. I would advise you, therefore, to think a lot about pain, its causes, its significance and the measures both medical and surgical necessary for its relief, for you will find …