William Osler

“ A plain proposition is before the people. We know the disease—how it is caused, how it is spread, how it should be prevented, how in suitable cases it may be cured. How to make this knowledge effective is the prime reason of this conference. It is a campaign for the public; past history shows that it is a campaign of hope. The measures for its stamping out, though simple on paper, present difficulties interwoven with the very fabric of society, but they are not insuperable, and are gradually disappearing. ”

“ A slow, painful progress, through three centuries, science crept on from point to point, with many mistakes and many failures, a progress often marked and flecked with the stains of human effort, but all the same the most revolutionary and far-reaching advance ever made by man's intellect. We are too close to the events to appreciate fully the changes which it has wrought in man's relation to the world ”

“ It is for this reason we urge you to join with enthusiasm in the crusade; remembering, however, that only the prolonged and united efforts, carried through several generations, can place the disease in the same category with typhus fever, typhoid and small-pox.
In the comedies and tragedies of life our immutable human nature reacts very much as in the dawn of science, and yet, with a widening of knowledge, the lights and shadows of the landscape have shifted, and the picture is brighter. Nothing can bring back the hour when sin and disease were correlated as confidently as night and day ”

“ But man's redemption of man is nowhere so well known as in the abolition and prevention of the group of diseases which we speak of as the fevers, or the acute infections. This is the glory of the science of medicine, and nowhere in the world have its lessons been so thoroughly carried out as in this country. It is too old a story to retell in detail, but I may remind you that in this city within fifty years there has been an annual saving of from four to five thousand lives, by measures which have directly prevented and limited the spread of infectious diseases. ”

“ The gospel of his goods—of man's relation to his fellow men, is written in blood on every page of history. Quietly and slowly the righteousness that exalteth a nation, the principles of eternal justice, have won acquiescence, at any rate in theory, though as nations and individuals we are still far from carrying them into practice. ”

“ But the third and greatest glory is that the leaves of the tree of science have availed for the healing of the nations. Measure as we may the progress of the world—intellectually in the growth and spread of education, materially in the application to life of all mechanical appliances, and morally in a higher standard of ethics between nation and nation, and between individuals, there is no one measure which can compare with the decrease of disease and suffering in man, woman and child. ”

“ In darkness and in the shadow of death he lay helpless, singing like the prisoners vain hymns of hope, and praying vain prayers of patience, yet having all the while in his bosom, like Christian, a key called Promise, capable of unlocking the doors of his dungeon. ”

“ The history of man is the story of a great martyrdom—plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder, crimes unspeakable, tortures inconceivable, and the inhumanity of man to man has even outdone what appear to be atrocities in nature. ”

“ Philosophy, as Plato tells us, begins with wonder; and, staring open-eyed at the starry heavens on the plains of Mesopotamia, man took a first step in the careful observation of Nature, which carried him a long way in his career. But he was very slow to learn the second step—how to interrogate Nature, to search out her secrets, as Harvey puts it, by way of experiment. ”

“ There are tones in human sentiment to-day which the ancients never heard, which our fathers indeed heard but faintly, and that without recognizing their significance. The human heart by which we live has been touched as with the wand of a Prospero. ”

“ The bright spot in the picture is the diminution of the mortality from plague—not fewer than a million fatal cases as compared with 1907.
These are brief indications of the lines along which effective progress is being made in man's redemption by man. And all this has a direct bearing upon the disease, the fight against which brings us together. Tuberculosis is one of the great infections of the world, and it has been one of the triumphs of our generation to determine its cause. ”

“ Not only is the Creator far off, but some being of malignant nature seems to have got hold of us, and to be making us his sport. Let us say that there are a thousand millions of men on the earth at this time; who can weigh and measure the aggregate of pain which this one generation has endured, and will endure from birth to death? ”

“ It is not too much to say that Charles Darwin has so turned man right-about-face that, no longer looking back with regret upon a Paradise Lost, he feels already within the gates of a Paradise Regained. ”

“ When we learn that last year there were no deaths from smallpox, not one from typhus, and only 21 from fevers of the zymotic group, it is scarcely credible that all this has been brought about within the memory of living men. It is not too much to say that the abolition of small-pox, typhus and typhoid fevers have changed the character of the medical practice in our hospitals. In this country typhoid fever is in its last ditch, and though a more subtle and difficult enemy to conquer than typhus, we may confidently hope that before long it will be as rare. ”

“ Greece died into a mediaevalism that for centuries enthralled man in chains, the weary length of which still hampers his progress. The revival of learning awakened at first a suspicion and then a conviction that salvation lay in a return to the old Greek fathers who had set man's feet in the right path, and so it came about that in the study of chemistry, and in the inventions of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, modern science took its origin. ”

“ From Homer to Lucian there is one refrain—the pride in the body as a whole; and in the strong conviction that "our soul in its rose-mesh" is quite as much helped by flesh as flesh is by soul, the Greek sang his song "For pleasant is this flesh." The beautiful soul harmonizing with a beautiful body is as much the glorious ideal of Plato as it is the end of the education of Aristotle. What a splendid picture in Book III of the Republic, of the day when "our youth will dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds and receive the good in everything ”

“ Nor is there need to fear that in weighing the world in our balance we may drain the sap of its life, so long as we materialize in the service of man those eternal principles on which life rests—moral fervour, liberty and justice. ”

“ At a stroke the curse of Eve was removed, that multiplied sorrow of sorrows, representing in all ages the very apotheosis of pain. The knife has been robbed of its terrors, and the hospitals are no longer the scenes of those appalling tragedies that made the stoutest quail. ”

“ The condition of Hopeful and Christian put by Giant Despair into "a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to their spirits," and beaten with stripes, and made to feel that the bitterness of death was as nothing to the bitterness of life, illustrates in allegory the state of man for countless centuries. ”

“ How little do we appreciate what even a generation has done. The man is only just dead, Robert Koch, who gave to his fellow-men the control of cholera. Read the history of yellow fever in Havana and in Brazil if you wish to get an idea of the powers of experimental medicine; there is nothing to match it in the history of human achievement. Before our eyes to-day the most striking experiment ever made in sanitation is in progress. The digging of the Panama Canal was acknowledged to be a question of the health of the workers. ”

“ In the old days every wound which suppurated had to be dressed, and there was the daily distress and pain, felt particularly by young children. Now, even after operations of the first magnitude, the wound may have but a single dressing, and the after-pain is reduced to a minimum. How well the older ones of us realize that anæsthetics and asepsis between them have wrought a complete revolution in hospital life. ”

“ Within the life-time of some of us a strange and wonderful thing happened on the earth—something of which no prophet foretold, of which no seer dreamt, nor is it among the beatitudes of Christ Himself ”

“ When one reads the account of the condition of the densely crowded districts on the south side of the High Street, one is not surprised that the rate of mortality was 40 and over per thousand. That you now enjoy one of the lowest death rates in Europe—15.3 per thousand for last year—is due to the thoroughness with which measures of recognized efficiency have been carried out. ”

“ To any one of you who wishes to know this side of science, what it is, what it has done, what it may do, let me commend Radot's Life of Pasteur, which reads like a fairy tale. It is more particularly in connection with the great plagues of the world that man's redemption of man may be in the future effected ”

“ In his introductory chapter of his Rise of the Greek Epic, Professor Murray dwells on the keen desire of the Greeks to make life a better thing than it is, and to help in the service of man, a thought that pervades Greek life like an aroma. ”

“ More widespread in its benediction, as embracing all races and all classes of society, is the relief of suffering, and the prevention of disease through the growth of modern sanitary science in which has been fought out the greatest victory in history. ”

“ A great deal of literature has been distributed, casting discredit upon the value of vaccination in the prevention of small-pox. I do not see how any one who has gone through epidemics as I have, or who is familiar with the history of the subject, and who has any capacity left for clear judgment, can doubt its value. ”

“ Is there not then some great gulf fixed between us and the good God?"
Dwelling too exclusively on this aspect of life, who does not echo the wish of Euripides: "Not to be born is the best, and next to die as soon as possible." ”

“ My generation was brought up in the belief that "Man was in his original state a very noble and exalted creature, being placed as the head and lord of this world, having all the creatures in subjection to him. ”

“ The glory of this zeal for the enrichment of the present life was revealed to the Greeks as to no other people, but in respect to care for the body of the common man, we have only seen its fulfilment in our own day, but as a direct result of methods of research initiated by them. ”

“ It has been brought about in great part by researches into the life history of the parasite which produces malaria, and by the effectual measures taken for its destruction. Here again is a chapter in human achievement for which it would be hard to find a parallel. But let us not forget that these are but illustrations of wide-spread possibilities of organization on modern lines. These are sanitary blessings. To make them available in the Tropics is the heaviest burden of the white man ”

“ With the improvement of sanitation there has been a reduction in its mortality, amounting since 1850 to above 40 per cent. But it still remains the most formidable single foe, killing a larger number of people than any other disease—some 60,000 in Great Britain and Ireland in 1908, and 589 of this city. ”