_Mr. President, Members of the Association, Friends and Neighbors_:
I needed no invitation to come before you to-day. All I needed was
permission. As soon as I learned that this association was to meet in
our village I felt that I must take advantage of the opportunity to say
a word of greeting to you in person.
Of course it is almost needless to say that there is not and can not
be any other lay profession the members of which occupy such a dual
position, each side of which is of such importance—for the doctor has
on the one hand to be the most thoroughly educated man in applied
science that there is in the country, and on the other hand, as
every layman knows, and as doubtless many a layman in the circle of
acquaintance of each of you would gladly testify, the doctor gradually
becomes the closest friend to more people than would be possible in
any other profession. The feelings that a man has toward the one human
being to whom he turns, either in time of sickness for himself, or,
what is far more important, in the time of sickness of those closest
and dearest to him, can not but be of a peculiar kind. He can not but
have a feeling for him such as he has for no other man. The doctor
must, therefore, to the greatest degree develop his nature along the
two sides of his duties, although in the case of any other man you
would call him a mighty good citizen if he developed only on one side.
The scientific man who is really a first-class scientific man has a
claim upon the gratitude of all the country; and the man who is a
first-class neighbor, and is always called in in time of trouble by his
neighbors, has an equal claim upon society at large. But the doctor has
both claims. Yet in addition to filling both of those functions he may
fill many other functions. He may have served in the Civil War; he may
have rendered the greatest possible service to the community along any
one of a dozen different lines.
Take, for instance, just what is being done in one of the great works
of this country at the present time—the digging of the Panama Canal.
That is a work that only a big nation could undertake or that a big
nation could do, and it is a work for all mankind. The condition
precedent upon success in that work is having the proper type of
medical work as a preliminary, as a basis. That is the first condition,
upon the meeting of which must depend our success in solving the
engineering and administrative problems of the work itself. I am happy
to say that the work is being admirably done, and I am particularly
glad to have this chance of saying it. Now and then some alarmist
report will come from Panama. Just a couple of weeks ago there seemed
to be a succession of people coming up from Panama, each one of whom
had some tale of terror to tell. You will always find in any battle,
even if it is a victorious battle, that in the rear you will meet
a number of gentlemen who are glad that they are not at the front;
who, if they have unfortunately gotten at the front, have come away,
and who justify their absence from the front by telling tales of how
everything has gone wrong there. Now the people that flee from Panama
will carry up here just such stories as the people that flee from the
forefront of a battle carry to the rear with them. The people to whom
this country owes and will owe much are those who stay down there and
do not talk, but do their work, and do it well. Of course, in doing
a great work like that in the tropics, in a region which until this
Government took hold of it was accounted to be a region exceptionally
unhealthy, we are going to have trouble, have some yellow fever, have a
good deal of malarial fever, and suffer more from the latter than from
the yellow fever, although we will hear nothing like the talk about it.
We will have every now and then trouble as regards hygiene, just as we
will have trouble in the engineering problems, just as occasionally we
will have troubles in the administrative work. Whenever any of those
troubles come there will be a large number of excellent but timid men
who will at once say what an awful calamity it is, and express the
deepest sorrow and concern, and be rather inclined to the belief that
the whole thing is a failure. It will not be a failure. It will be a
success; and it will be a success because we shall treat every little
check, not as a reason for abandoning the work, but as a reason for
altering and bettering our plans so as to make it impossible that that
particular check shall happen again.
What is being done in Panama is but a sample of the things that this
country has done during the last few years, of the things in which
your profession has borne so prominent a part. Take what we did in
Cuba, where we tried the experiment which had not been tried for four
hundred years—of cleaning the cities. One of the most important items
of the work done by our Government in Cuba was the work of hygiene,
the work of cleaning and disinfecting the cities so as to minimize the
chance for yellow fever, so as to do away with as many as possible of
the conditions that told for disease. This country has never had done
for it better work, that is, work that reflected more honor upon the
country, or for humanity at large, than the work done for it in Cuba.
And the man who above all others was responsible for doing that work
so well was a member of your profession, who when the call to arms
came himself went as a soldier to the field—the present Major-General
Leonard Wood. Leonard Wood did in Cuba just the kind of work that,
for instance, Lord Cromer has done in Egypt. We have not been able to
reward Wood in anything like the proportion in which services such as
his would have been rewarded in any other country of the first rank;
and there have been no meaner and more unpleasant manifestations
in all our public history than the feelings of envy and jealousy
manifested toward Wood. And the foul assaults and attacks made upon
him, gentlemen, were largely because they grudged the fact that this
admirable military officer should have been a doctor.