The lure and lore of surgery.

What is an oration and how does one qualify for the job? Is there a correspondence course, night school or tutor available and who were those orators of the past? There have in fact been 107 Opening Addresses of this nature, the earliest in 1826, ten years after Laennec's epoch making invention of the stethoscope. Medicine" which is of interest as I stand before you as a systemic surgeon. Dr McDonnell's story is well told by Ian Fraser in his Opening Address on the heritage of the Royal Victoria Hospital given in 1952, a mere 37 years ago; Sir Ian was then Senior Surgeon of this hospital and remains so here with us today. As I scanned my predecessors-a la recherche de temps perdu-I discovered that 50 were physicians, 52 were surgeons; there were no women. The age range interested me, but would have been extremely difficult to calculate, and it was in any case decided long ago that the address should be given on merit rather than on seniority. This rule has in fact been disobeyed throughout, and is certainly disobeyed today. Subject matter was more difficult, as the titles alone gave only a hint of their contents and to read through them all seemed a herculean task more suited to our archivist than to a mere bone surgeon. Suffice it to say that it should be a learned discourse, and represent a lifetime of professional zeal and study. My first duty is to welcome to their clinical years another generation of medical students. It is 40 years since I myself first crept into the back row of clinical bedside voyeurism, anxious not to be noted for my appalling unsuitability to the medical profession. No such fear need cross your minds nor does it cross mine as I contemplate you. Only this year it was a rare honour to examine for the first time a small sample of the final year. I was immensely impressed at the breadth of their knowledge, and the humanity displayed. If this is to be your standard we need have no fear for the future. What is it that constitutes the urge to embark on a career in medicine? This is perhaps an overworked theme. There are legions of reasons, or to use the modern jargon it is multi-factorial. No one reason dominates nor do any particular qualities constitute the essential ingredients. Some qualities …