Harry S. N. Greene, M.D.

Hic locus est, et iam tempus est, nobis doctori Harrico Viridi honores dare. This is the place and now is the time for us to give honors to Doctor Harry Greene! And Dr. Greene, were he here, besides scurrilous remarks about bad Latin Grammar would undoubtedly comment that the "Harrico Viridi" bit sounds suspiciously like "green beans" in French! Dr. Harry S. N. Greene thought it was a man's duty to be happy. To me this was his outstanding strength-and it pervaded all his work, all his relations with his colleagues, all his relations with his house-staff and with his students. Now, happiness to Dr. Greene might be going fishing all summer, or it might be sitting on the animal room floor looking at guinea pig eyes all night, but it could be summed up simply as a man's having the courage to do the things he really wants to do. That is the life Dr. Greene lived; that is all he required of anyone else; that is the opportunity he sought for all of us. Happiness? The opportunity to do what one wants? How do these fit with the present stifling trends and fashions in science, with the stifling sophistication of technology that passes so often for scientific excellence. Full well Dr. Greene knew that happiness, and opportunity-these two alone-lead to the free and independent thought upon which the synthesis of new ideas depends. But let him tell you this, in his own inimitable fashion, addressing the second year class: Pathology, probably more than any other branch of science, suffers from heroes and hero-worship. Rudolf Virchow has been its archangel and William Welch its John the Baptist, while Paracelsus and Cohnheim have been relegated to the roles of Lucifer and Beelzebub. Nonworshippers are thought of as Communists or eccentric characters while orthodox believers have become its leaders, and by their grandeur and complacency have stifled a free expression of noncomformist opinion. Actually, there are no heroes in Pathology-all of the great thoughts permitting advance have been borrowed from other fields, and the renaissance of pathology stems not from pathology itself but from the philosophers Kant and Goethe. Our method of teaching pathology here is somewhat different from that of other medical schools and is based on the unorthodox assumption that the medical student is an intelligent individual. We hold no examinations and give no grades. Teaching and research for us are essentially two sides of the same coin and cannot be differentiated.