Roswell Park

“ THE STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE CIRCULATION A Study of the Times and Labors of William Harvey [9]
History in general is but a record of the succession of great events or epochs which have moulded the world's affairs. That which is of the greatest import in the life of the individual may count for little in the lives of his contemporaries, and yet it must be said that in the events of to-day there has occurred a great epoch in the life of each of you, presumably the most important as yet in your personal records. ”

“ Their worship was mystical, but not because Jesus so taught;—rather because of their environment and traditions. The practice of baptism, the last supper and the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection have been as certainly added to the Nazarene's sublime code of ethics as to them in turn, in the centuries to follow, were added every conceivable notion, mystery and stupid absurdity which the diseased minds of men could imagine, and which have been the cause of more departure from Christ's original teachings, and of more strife and bloodshed than any other feature in the history of mankind. ”

“ But I submit to you, that brave as is such a deed and worthy of all possible honor, it has been hundreds of times for one exceeded in the actual devotion to duty and the resolution required to brave the elements, or to face death elsewhere than on the battlefield, or to surrender strength or mayhap life itself, or to invite disaster by infection, or to wear out and work out life in the constant grinding altruistic work of doing for others, who perhaps have violated every known sanitary law and forfeited their every right to live. ”

“ He believed that the essence of truth inhered in those differences which kept men apart, and still sever them. He believed the law of love and that it sprang from God, which is the Father of All, that it was in harmony with nature, and that by love we may be transformed into something of His likeness. As Bruno himself says:—"This is the religion, above controversy or dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom of my fatherland and my race." ”

“ THE RELATION OF THE GRECIAN MYSTERIES TO THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIANITY Ever since mentality has been an attribute of mankind, man has appreciated that he is surrounded by a vast incomprehensible mystery which ever closes in upon him, and from whose environment he may never free himself. The endeavor to solve this mystery has on one hand stimulated his reasoning power, and on the other nearly paralyzed it. Having no better guidance he has in all time attributed to a Great First Cause powers and faculties, even shape and form, more or less human ”

“ My mind is freed from the necessity for the mysterious which the Graeco-Jewish people demanded, and which the superstitious people of to-day still demand, and I prefer to let him stand for what he seems to me to be,—the greatest moralist and teacher of all time, rather than to surround him with a veil of imagery and with statements so impossible of belief as to make it impossible to accept one part without accepting them all. ”

“ Lessons of great importance may be gathered from a more careful study of this great historical epoch, but they must be left to your own powers of reasoning rather than to what I may add here. I commend it to you as a fertile source of inspiration, and a line of research worthy of both admiration and imitation. Few men have rendered greater service to the world by the shedding of blood than did Harvey, in his innocent and wonderful studies of its natural movement. ”

“ From the days when the first duty of the so-called army surgeon was to minister to his commanding general, and when the private soldier received but the scantiest if any attention, we have arrived at that time when the good health of the entire army is the aim and pride of the medical corps, and when public opinion demands for every enlisted man a degree of watchful care greater than many parents bestow upon their own families. ”

“ Moreover what keen and sensitive natures may do under the influence of torture is never to be predicated. How many of us could resist the persuasiveness of the rack when it came to modifying our beliefs? But whatever may have been his weakness at that time, he completely rehabilitated himself before his end, for were not his ashes scattered to the winds as a token that he completely failed to recant? Surely no martyr to science or dogma ever died a more dignified death, for the edification or example of others. ”

“ Old Yale sets now her stamp upon you. It will prove a passport to many homes, but must never be abused. It will entitle you to the society of the cultivated and to the respect of scholars everywhere. It will admit you to the ranks of the learned and cause you to be treated with respect and equality by some of the profoundest and most scholarly thinkers the world has even known. ”

“ But the men like Sir Spencer Wells, who has added his 40,000 years of life to the total of human longevity, or like Sir Joseph Lister, who has shown our profession how to conquer that arch enemy of time past, surgical sepsis, or like Morton, who first publicly demonstrated how to bring on a safe and temporary condition of insensibility to pain, are men more worthy in our eyes of lasting fame, and much greater heroes of their times, and of all time,—yet are practically unknown to the world at large, to whom they have ministered in such an unmistakable and superior way. ”

“ On the day after his arrival the Duke of Guise dramatically presented him, on the ramparts, to all his officers, who embraced him, and hailed him with loud acclaim, while by the soldiers he was received with shouts of triumph. "We shall not die," they exclaimed, "even though wounded, for Paré is among us." The effect of this great surgeon's appearance was to give new vigor to the defenders, and to it was due the fact that the city was saved. ”

“ He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment. He substituted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man ascends by the study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience. ”

“ These were the days when magic, mingled with mystery, played no small rôle in the practice of medicine, and when disgusting and curious remedies were quite in vogue. Superstition and ignorance everywhere played a most prominent part. For instance, it was, in those days, an excellent remedy to creep under the coffin of a saint. When a person was poisoned it was considered wise to hang him up by the feet and perhaps to gouge out one of his eyes, in order that the poison might run out. ”

“ That theology should lead to war is the antithesis of the Christian doctrine, yet no wars have been so fierce and bloody as those waged in "spreading the cross" and propagating a misinterpreted gospel. And so theology suffered doubly from the Monks who perverted it, and from the Knights and the State that inculcated it with fire and sword. ”

“ How often during these recent decades when events have seemed to move faster, when discoveries and inventions have been announced at such frequent and brief intervals that we fail to note them all for lack of time, when haste and rush characterize habits alike of life and thought, do we find that we simply must stop, as it were for breath, while we unload a large amount of accumulated mental rubbish and clear a space in our storage capacity for up-to-date knowledge! ”

“ They are, happily in one respect, too numerous to mention, and again are not yet public property, because modesty is ever the accompaniment of these other traits which we all admire so much. Hence, gentlemen, if I seem to you to disregard or forget many an incident in your lives or the careers of your friends, ascribe it to my ignorance rather than to my intent, and to the fact that I have never seen a battle, and that my fights with disease have not been fought in camps, but within the walls of the quiet sick room or hospital ward. ”

“ Means of taking human life must be constantly at hand; means of saving it are of small importance until the emergency has arisen; and then the blame for inadequate provision of both means and men falls not where it belongs, on the politicians who would not look ahead, but upon the administration of the medical department, who work to the point of desperation and despair in times of peace, who keep perpetual vigil, with scant recognition of the sacredness of their purpose, and scant aid in its accomplishment. ”

“ Heaven was represented as masculine, fructifying, powerful; Earth as conceptive, female and gentle. By the union of these two were produced sun, moon and their progeny—the stars. Later the sun became Poseidon or Neptune, because he appeared from and disappeared into the sea. Then the imagination began to run riot, and gave rise to many individual divinities, gods and goddesses, all with human passions and attributes, mingling and propagating after human fashion, and begetting dynasties and half human races, whose doings were the subject of countless epics, dramas, myths and romances. ”

“ Faber says,—"The Ancient Pagans of almost every part of the globe were wont to symbolize the world by an egg; hence this symbol is introduced into the cosmogonies of nearly all nations, and there are few persons even among those who have made mythology their study to whom the mundane egg is not perfectly familiar; it is the emblem not only of earth and life but also of the universe in its largest extent." ”

“ The world erects imposing monuments or builds tombs, like that of Napoleon, to the memory of those who have been the greatest destroyers of their race; and so Cæsar, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Richard the Lion-hearted, Gustavus Vasa, Napoleon and hundreds of other great military murderers have received vastly more attention, because of their race-destroying propensities and abilities, than if they had ever fulfilled fate in any other capacity. ”

“ It perhaps is not kind to think that anyone would ever be more courageous in public than in private, and yet it is to be feared that human nature is not always free from temptation of this kind. But the real silent heroes of military or civil medical life are those who engage in duties which nevertheless have even more of danger about them than spectacular performances upon the battle field. ”

“ The Creation is in fact a human rather than a divine product, in this sense that it was suggested to the mind of man by the existence of things, while its method was, at least at first, suggested by the operations of nature; thus man saw the living bird emerge from the egg, after a certain period of incubation, a phenomenon equivalent to actual creation as apprehended by his simple mind. Incubation obviously then associated itself with Creation, and this fact will explain the universality with which the egg was received as a symbol in the earlier systems of cosmogony. ”

“ The trend of science to-day is along the lines of comparative investigation, and the Bible is by no means the only literary collection which to-day is being subjected to the "higher criticism." The inspiration claimed for the contributors to that great ancient Collection is denied to the writers of great modern works, where, nevertheless, fundamental truth is as requisite for the welfare of the body as in the other for that of the soul. Only by painstaking research, laboriously repeated, do we clear the old paths of the rubbish of centuries or discover totally new ones. ”

“ Since it is possible for a man to understand medical science only if he has previously learned something of logic, we ordain that no one shall be permitted to study medicine until he has given his attention to logic for three years. ”

“ STUDENT LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES [5] I assume that every university student of today realizes that his possibilities and his opportunities are better in every way than were those enjoyed by students of bygone times. I take it, also, that you would not be averse to listening to an account of the habits, the surroundings, the privileges, and the disadvantages which surrounded students at a time when universities were young and when customs in general, as well as manners, were very different from those of to-day. ”

“ In spite of this general renaissance of medical learning and the impetus felt by the inspired few during the sixteenth century, it must be said that the general condition of medical science and of those who practised it was not greatly improved. The superstition of the common people and the timidity and indolence of all concerned were about as marked as they have ever been in the history of human error, and the practice of medicine was at least a century behind the applied knowledge of the other arts and sciences. ”

“ In truth, in northern Europe the Church included practically all the learned professions, including the civil servants of the government, the physicians, architects, secular lawyers, diplomatists, and secretaries, who were all ecclesiastics. It is true that in order to be a "clerk" it was not really necessary to take even minor orders, but it was so easy for a king or bishop to reward his physician, his lawyer, or his secretary by a monastic office rather than by a large salary, that the average student, at least in the larger places, looked to holy orders as his eventual destination. ”

“ He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and his application of it to pure thought suggested to his penetrating and audacious intellect."
Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not sufferer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the human intellect. ”

“ When with Grecian mysticism were associated the nobility of Socrates, the philosophy of Plato, the science of Aristotle and the Jewish belief in one God, it is not strange that out of these elements, combined with the teachings of simple humanity enunciated by Christ, there resulted a power which transformed the world. The view that all mankind are brothers, originally Jewish, was also of independent Greek origin and came especially from the Stoics, who had to lie dormant until some tie stronger than mere political association held men together. ”

“ Belief in an evil power constantly at work has existed from absolutely prehistoric times. It has been more or less tacitly adopted and sanctioned by various creeds or religious beliefs, particularly so by the church of Rome, by mediaeval writers and by writers on occult science. Even now it exists not only among savage nations but everywhere among common people. We to-day may call it superstition, but there was a time when it held enormous sway over mankind, and exercised a tremendous influence. ”