Aspects of Medical History

IT is my privilege today to be the one chosen to welcome you to another year of work at the hospital. Believe me, I do so with real pleasure and with the sincere wish that, within these walls, you students may acquire that understanding of human nature and knowledge of disease which must be the rewards of love of medicine and diligent study. Some of you will be returning to familiar surroundings; others will be preparing for the final year's work. But there must be many of you who have just completed your preliminary studies in the dissecting-room and laboratory. You, especially, will gaze eagerly upon the promised land of clinical medicine, and I think you will not be disappointed. It is a fair prospect, with wide open spaces that delight the eye; but I must warn you, the distances are deceptive ! You must allow plenty of time if you would journey inland to the great city, and you must carry sufficient store of the guiding principles of the basic sciences: anatomy, physiology, and pathology, otherwise you may lose your way. There are signposts at the crossroads , of course, and most cof them reliable, but only the incurious will follow them blindly. Let me remind you, that in this country today , we rely less and less upon signposts ! Most of them, indeed, have been removed. Medicine, like the nation, may be approaching a decisive phase in its history, and it is you who will be setting forth on the road of practice in the immediate postwar era. The year 1940-41 has been an unfortunate one for the hospital, for it has seen the deaths of three distinguished members of our honorary consulting and visiting staffs-the Emeritus Professor of Surgery : Colonel Thomas Sinclair; a former senior surgeon of the hospital: Mr. T. S. Kirk; and the senior radiologist: Dr. Robert Maitland Beath. Professor Sinclair became a student at Queen's in 1877, that is, sixty-four years ago; at about the same period as the Bell telephone and the incandescent electric lamp were invented. He was still a student when Pasteur discovered the streptococcus, and Eberth isolated the typhoid bacillus. I mention these facts not because they are new, but because they illustrate the great changes that have taken place in this most crowded epoch of our medical history, the past fifty years. As the poet says: "Time …