Excerpt from What Is Medicine?

A Presidential address is usually gratulatory to the body which has honored the speaker by selecting him to preside over it. In medical conclaves it is also customarily historical. The shades of Hippocrates and Celsus, of Galen and Avicenna, are paraded in their ancient garbs, and twenty centuries are gone over in as many minutes, preluding a summary of the novelties and notorieties of the preceding year, which, in these days of medical periodicals, is an easier matter than it used to be. The special olog'y which each Association flies as its distinguishing pendant determines the objects legitimately within its purview, and the President, for the time, is monarch of the medical, surgical, gynecological, ophthalmological, rhinological, dermatological or whatever other realm, for the two, three, or, at most, four days he may have to rule, without question of his authority, provided he does not encroach upon the domain of any fellow sovereign.

But the American Academy of Medicine would have little reason for being at all, and I no occasion for any public utterance, if its place were to be sought among the pathological and clinical, the biological and sanitary associations of a national character, which are numerous enough to include the devotees of each particular department of our great science. It is, however, concerned with none of these parts of the body politic of Medicine, but with the illimitable spirit which animates them all. It trenches on no other's ground, and hence antagonizes none, but, permeating all, seeks to cement them into a compact unity by inculcating principles that should govern all.

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