Some Aspects of the Relationship between Mother and Child

I MUST, at once, say what a pleasure it is to see so many old friends again, and I must thank most warmly those who have put me into my present privileged position. Effectively to recapture the past is beyond most of us. The attempt by an individual to do so, however, can be pleasurable and may be salutary or even poignant. But be the reaction as it may, the evocation of old and partly forgotten experience is sometimes a pious duty-as it is for me on this occasion. I joined the medical school here, in the company of several who are also present tonight, nearly thirty-five years ago. Since I left Belfast, after having been successively student, houseman at the Royal, and demonstrator of anatomy, a quarter of a century has elapsed. My memories of this medical school, therefore, which are very happy ones, go back a long way, encompass a considerable period, and, in some respects, are remarkably clear. If the occasion were opportune what tales I could relate, and not only of my fellow-undergraduates! -Unfortunately these memories, in the context of tonight's commemoration, do not go back far enough for me to give you a first-hand and coherent account of Robert Campbell. His name was held in the highest regard by our clinical teachers, who had been his colleagues and pupils. And to this vicarious knowledge of him I can add one piece of direct evidence on the manner of man he was. My father-in-law, who knew him well, used to tell of sitting beside him in a tram. Robert Campbell suddenlv emerged from a small volume in which he was immersed to exclaim-"There's the best definition of life I have met!" The book was Measure for Measure; the line indicated was "This sensible warm motion" from Claudio's moving speech in the first scene of the third act. Such an anecdote, trivial though it may seem, surely limns the character! He was a successful, and busy, surgeon who read Shakespeare in a tram-car, and read him with critical and sensitive attention. Of Robert Campbell's high standing in his profession you will have been told in previous orations, made by those better able, by far, to judge on such a matter than can I. Nevertheless, I must record that I have heard high praise of him, and of his work-as a pioneer in aseptic surgery, as first in the diagnosis of the obstructed appendix, as brilliant innovator in the repair of infantile herniae. And I have heard this praise in regions where it was not underwritten by local patriotism. Robert Campbell was one of that distinguished group of Belfastmen who put the Queen's Medical Faculty on the 35