The writer of these papers, composed at different times for specific
occasions, without thought at their writing, of eventual collective
publication, was beloved by his friends for qualities of heart and mind
that were not associated by them with his professional achievements.
Yet as one thinks of him in retrospect, appraising him as a physician,
one becomes more and more convinced that his great significance for
American medicine sprang from those very qualities which endeared
him in his personal relations, applied to and interwoven with his
professional life. Intellectual and emotional sanity and integrity,
from which wisdom, kindness and courtesy are derived, were the natural
endowments which brought him distinction as a human being and which
gave him an importance for American medicine possessed by very few of
his contemporaries.
In the history of medicine there are many names associated with
the discovery of facts, with learned treatises and with technical
achievements of one kind or another; there are relatively few of whom
we think especially as physicians in the sense in which this word is
used in regard to Suydenham, for instance. It is a rare blending of
learning and humanity, incisiveness of intellect and sensitiveness
of the spirit, which occasionally come together in an individual who
chooses the calling of Medicine; and then we have the great physician.
His professional life fell into a period of reorganization and
unparalleled expansion in the medical world in which public attention
quite naturally was focused on the material phases of these changes.
Fundamental to these, however, and far more permanently significant,
there was an intellectual reorganization and expansion which demanded
the development of new leaders who might accomplish for our generation
what men like Neusser, Nothnagel, McKenzie, Osler, Delafield, Shattuck
and James had accomplished for the one just past. Of these young
standard-bearers of the new Medicine he had become an affectionately
acknowledged leader. As he grew in maturity and authority his interests
were forced, almost in spite of himself, beyond his immediate work in
laboratory and wards, into the more general problem of the relations
of his profession to education, public health, sociology and, we may
call it, its moral and philosophical bearing upon community life. In
the educational phases of his work, the clinic which he headed at the
Boston City Hospital represents a contribution to the constructive
coördination of teaching, investigation and the care of the sick which
solved many difficult problems and has already exerted a profound and
lasting influence upon medical organization. This was his chief work at
the end of his life and here he was continuing the studies which had
already made him a noteworthy investigator and teacher.
But the imagination and critical faculties which had given value to his
investigations were equally fertile in the more general aspects of his
interests. Sought as a member of the most important scientific bodies
of our country, he was capable of impersonal judgments and retained,
as he would have indefinitely, that combination of the young heart and
the old head in which the passage of time makes little difference and
which, together, are the essentials of true understanding.
Of all his valuable contributions to the development of modern
medicine, these short papers are the ones which deal most directly with
the problems forced upon medicine by its own rapid development and by
the increased opportunities and responsibilities which involved it with
educational, social and economic changes. They deal with questions
many of which are still unsolved, and their publication will serve to
continue the influence of a voice that American medicine could ill
afford to lose--one of clear-headedness, unsentimental idealism and the
great wisdom of affectionate optimism.
Hans Zinsser.