Gilbert and Sullivan

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-For upwards of forty years I have lived the busy life of a general practitioner attached to a small hospital in a provincial town. This demanded all my attention and most of my energies, but somehow within the last few years, I have been pitchforked into the arena of medical politics, and in that field great honours have been bestowed upon me. The very greatest of these -the position to which you, Sir, have installed me to-night It is a great honour for any medical man to be elected President of this Society and immeasurably greater when that person is a humble general practitioner like myself. Some time ago a B.M.A. Committee put the G.P. under the microscope, and in their published report they say of him that "Only a superman could possess all the desirable qualities of the ideal general practitioner. He should have inexhaustible tact, wisdom, patience, discretion and imperturbability. He needs to be gentle, yet firm in speech and action, and his manner must inspire confidence and trust. He should have a kindly, humane approach to his patients, and however pressed for time, he should make each patient feel that his illness is of real concern to him." Formidable as is the list of qualtiies here cited, there is a.very important one not as yet mentioned, viz., the making of speeches, to me the most terrifying of them all. The little boy who was asked to explain the origin of speeches (species), and who answered that it was something that came down from the apes, was perhaps not so far wrong, though it resulted from either faulty hearing or a mistaken conception of Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis. But, however the custom arose of inflicting a speech on an incoming president, it is a barbarous one and one that falls not infrequently on the medical practitioner.