UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

1065 about. They are as wise as a blind man who denied the charm of colour or one incapable of perceiving odour the sweetness of the violet and the rose. It was a doctor of medicine who wrote the play called The Good-natured Man. OF It was Oliver Goldsmith. Jack Lofty, on hearing the name of the poet Waller exclaimed: "Is he of the house?" Mrs. Croaker replied:"The modern poet of that name, sir." We men of business despise the Jack: "Oh, a modern I DELIVERED AT THE and as for the ancients, we have no time to read moderns ; MEDICAL SCHOOLS them. Poetry is a pretty thing enough for our wives and AT THE daughters; but not for us. Why now, here I stand that know nothing of books-I say, madam, I know nothing of Session 1910-11. Opening of the books ; and yet I believe I can talk my two hours without feeling the want of them." I suppose there may be found to-day people equally vain of their imbecility. What are UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON. some of the greatest names in history but the names of OF BY THE DEAN SALISBURY. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS poets ? In telling such names over who could leave out AT the opening of the Winter Session the chair was taken Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and by Sir THOMAS BARLOW, President of the Royal College of Milton, and Goethe ? I have no ;patience with people who Physicians of London, whose retirement from the active staff without shame say they do not care for poetry, for they !-ay of University College Hospital has just been announced. they do not care for some of the loftiest products of the The DEAN OF SALISBURY said it was the admiration and human mind. If you have not at present a liking for poetry affection with which he regarded medical men which com- then make one. How can it be done, and so done as not pelled him to consent to undertake the responsibility and gave to withdraw too much energy from your professional work ? him his qualification in coping with the difficulty of address- I should say choose a poet who is acknowledged by the ing the students, teachers, and authorities of University weightiest authorities to be a true and great poet. Do not College Hospital. He felt justified in saying that there never waste time on what are called the minor poets. Some of had beena clargyman who, during his tenure of a metropolitan them in time may be placed among the major poets. But if living, had gathered around him in one church for nearly 30 you can have but little it is all-important you should have years so large a number of men eminent in the medical the best. Having chosen your great poet, and one not of profession as he had, and that fact was the pride of his life. your own generation, who can only idealise the age of which It was the practice of his calling to take a text, as it was you are a part and represent yourself, then every day, even that of theirs to write a prescription. He would take as his if it be but for five minutes, read a page. Read it carefully, text a section from the I I Pens6es " of Pascal, mathematician, noting every suggestive word and visualising every scene. physicist, philosopher, and man of science and ascetic piety : When something pre-eminently expressive or melodious "Man is evidently made for thinking. This is his whole strikes you mark it with a pencil. Each day peruse your dignity and the whole of his merit. To think as he ought is page, looking back on previous ones to re-impress what you the whole of his duty, and the true order of thinking is to have already noted. Do this ; and not a year will have gone begin with himself, his Author, and his end. And yet what by without your growing keener to perceive beauty and more is it that is thought in the world ? Not one of these objects, sensitive to the impact of its charm. A short time ago I was but how to take pleasures, how to make ourselves kings, told that Wordsworth was little read by Oxford men. Well, without ever reflecting what it is to be a king or even to be there are men and men as well as ninth parts of men. I can a man." scarcely believe that those university men who are destined He impressed the necessity for realising the powers, to make a mark in the world, men of sound and wide attainpotentialities, and special appetences with which man is ments, can be indifferent to, or unacquainted with, this great endowed, but recognised that in this life time is wanting for poet-who, alas, was often a great proser. Too much metrical a complete self-culture and development ; and, moreover, the prose is to be found in his longer poems ; but they have in special subjects on which medical men must occupy the them bursts of inspiration radiant as the sunshine gilding the main power of their minds were impediments in the way of lake he loved. Mr. Bradley, who was professor of poetry at complete self-development, but concentration of all the Oxford, said of Wordsworth, "Indisputablythe most sublime mental energies in one direction must leave the other powers of our poets since Milton." John Stuart Mill, a man whose and capabilities of the mind unused and cause them to young life no sunshine of poetry brightened its dreary dwindle and die. Lord Morley had said : " One of the most laborious days, speaks of Wordsworth’s poems as" a medicine narrow and what will eventually be one of the most imHe said "compared with the for his state of mind." poverishing characteristics of our day is the excessive claims greatest poets he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical for physical science," from which other manifestations of natures possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unintellectual activity need protection. poetical natures are precisely those who require poetical For artists, poets, and for many women such subjects as cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is more fitted to psychology, mathematics, and the exact sciences would tend give than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he." to balance the mind and strengthen the judgment and make Try, I would say to those who at present are not students, imagination the charm and not the master of life, but for still less lovers, of poetry, try Wordsworth’s "Prelude" and them the realm of the fine arts was that into which they "Excursion." One page a day, five minutes’ meditation, proof should make excursions for the refreshment and enlargement by experiment ; and I am sure that all the organically except of their mental life. Some attention to architecture, paint- and incurably dull, who are as incapable of poetic sensibility ing, sculpture, music, and poetry should by a solemn deter- as a piece of putty for emitting music, in a single year will, mination always engage some of their energy. It might be without interfering with professional work, have evoked from said that such a discipline would only produce diletantism hidden, unperceived, subliminal depths a poetic sensibility with variety for its inseparable accident ; but was a little which will be an organ of ever-increasing delight. I am not knowledge less desirable than complete ignorance or a dunce suggesting that you should all attempt to become poets. I more admirable than a dilettante ? Most of all he urged the daresay many of you have written verses, and some fair claims of poetry and continued :being has placed them in her bosom and thought them Not so long ago one of the most learned scholars in beautiful. Well, what can be happier than to be in Europe said to me, " Last time we met you did me a great love1 Imagination and emotional sensibility which belong service ; you told me to read a little poetry every day, and to youth and ripening manhood are especially quickened I have done it ever since." If I could induce all you I by the ardours of love. They give glow and expression have the privilege of addressing to go and do likewise you and poetic sensitiveness in the days when the heart would think of me with gratitudf when I am no more. For is more than a muscle, and the eyes of a girl poetry is the queen of the arts. It is the thought, the vision, more than a study in optics. May you have no cardiac the emotion, of some powerful mind vitalised by imagination failure in this respect, and may your love and its gladness and expressed in that mode of music we call rhyme or live longer than your verses. There have been members of rhythm. People who say that the subjects of poetry can be your profession to whom has been accorded the name of more effectively told in prose do not know what they are Poet. But I have a suspicion that their eminence as poets

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INTRODUCTORY ADDRESSES, ETC.,

1066 was was

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Oliver Goldsmith

perhaps one of the best representatives of poetic accomplishment in the medical profession. It is uncertain where and how he obtained his medical degree, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that he did, in his foreign wanderings, receive a nominal qualification for practice. This must have been small and brief.

homage, the worship of our whole composite nature can wisely be rendered. No humiliating sense of littleness nor f puerility, nor of irrationality can shame the artist aiming t perfect beauty, the scientist and the philosopher at absoate truth, and the moralist at a supreme good, who offers p his worship ; and worship, as Browning tells us, is Loved and praised at height." he

It is said that he drew certain Mrs. Sidebotham which prescription so appalled the apothecary that he refused to make ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL. it up, and that as the lady sided with the apothecary " he threw up the case and his profession at the same INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS ON THE ROMANCE OF MEDICINE," BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. SIR time. But what a delightful, fascinating writer Goldsmith AFTER a few introductory words, in which he referred to isI All who have any poetic taste are charmed by the tenderness and simple yet perfect grace and his experiences as a medical man in a rural village, in the music of the " Deserted Village." All who care for genial slums of great cities, in an Arctic whaler, in the neighbourhumour mingled with the restraining pensiveness of one who hood of Cavendish-square, Sir ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE went knows the sorrows of life as well as the eccentricities which on to say that a medical training was a most valuable possession provoke a smile are in love with the"Vicar of Wakefield." for a man, even if he did not afterwards engage in practice. All who care for English comedy without vulgarity and without After a medical education all work in life, if done in the pruriency welcome the revival on the stage of She Stooyrs right spirit, became far more easy. He then referred to the to Conquer. A story is told of Goldsmith that after visit- undue materialism of the period when he received his ing a very poor patient he gave him a very large pill-box, in education-a materialism which he thought was due to a which he had placed such money as he had, and on it the reaction against transcendental dogmas. Mellow experience words (To be taken as occasion requires." Ah! I have and riper thought, however, made a man realise that did not explain everything, and he continued:forgotten a greater poet :still-first almost in my opinion of materialism " the brilliant stars which shine in the firmament of the nineI would ask you then, gentlemen, in your studies of teenth century—I mean Keats. He studied medicine at St. matter, not to be precipitate in your conclusions as to spirit. Thomas’s Hospital, and when his poems appeared vulgar Keep your minds open on the subject. And besides an reviewers tried to extinguish them by sneering at the author’s undue materialism, there is another danger upon which I medical training. "Go back to the shop, Mr. John ; stick would warn you. It is intellectual priggishness. There to plasters and pills and ointment boxes." ...... The poems is a type of young medical man who has all his diseases live and the reviewer is everlastingly damned. I do nicely tabulated, and all his remedies nicely tabulated, the one not call upon you to devote yourselves to the produc- exactly fitting the other-you produce the symptom, and he tion of poetry ; suffice it to say that your minds should will produce the tabloid-who really is a very raw product. become, as it were, cabinets of beautiful things. Even Life may turn him into a more finished article. Each if you had to limit your pecuniary gains for the sake of a generation has thought it knew all about it, each generation complete development, would it be a serious loss7 It has in turn discovered its limitations, and yet with invincible was asked by one, who must be venerated by all, as optimism each fresh lot still thinks that they really have got He is worshipped by millions,"What is a man ad-vantaged to the bottom of the matter. Not only have we never got to if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? the end of any medical matter, but it is only the truth that By losing the soul I mean losing the finer capabilities and we have never got to the beginning of it. What we have potentialities of the thinking being, with all the gracious done is to come in in the middle of it, with more or less satisfactions which they produce, and by so much becoming accurate empirical knowledge. It will help to keep you less than man. There are thousands of things which are not humble if you remember how largely the very words we use, A simple home where love and Life, Matter, Spirit, and so on, are mere symbols of the real necessary for happiness. refined taste and mental accomplishments and social meaning of which we know little. There is another fact which life will teach-the value of graciousness are established may be had on a comparatively In many a humble clerical home, British kindliness and humanity as well as of knowledge. That small income. and German, there is refinement of manners and intellectual is exactly the point which the intellectual prig has accomplishment; there are sons and daughters in whom missed. A strong and kindly personality is as valuable an virtue, brains, and religion are worthily combined, who asset as actual learning in a medical man. I do not mean become strength and fibre in their native land. What more that trained urbanity which has been called the bedside is necessary ? That they should start life with a fortune ? manner,’ but the real natural benevolence which may be At any rate it is slowly cultivated in the character, but cannot be simulated Better that they should make one. Those who think by any forced geniality. I have known men in the promore to be a man than to be a money-bag. otherwise must be left to amass the most they can and then fession who were stuffed with accurate knowledge, and yet descend to a grave where gains of coins can never were so cold in their bearing, and so unsympathetic in their enter. What if there is afterwards a long life even for ever attitude, assuming the r6le rather of a judge than a friend, and ever I What to enter a spirit world with a pauper mind! that they left their half-frozen patients all the worse for I am not certain but an eight hours Bill enforced upon their contact. While on the other hand, I have known-and successful members of the learned professions might not be who has not ?-men who were of such exuberance of vitality good for them, and certainly an advantage to those who have and kindliness that however humble their degrees the mere to wait until middle life before a real start in successful clasp of their hand and light in their eyes have left their practice can be made. Perhaps there should also be fixed a patient in a more cheery and hopeful mood. Above all, no time for retirement, as in the army and navy, in order to doctor has a right to be a pessimist. If you are conscious of make way for younger practitioners, and afford opportunity that temperament you should fly the profession. A reasoned to complete the neglected development of the elder. Iu a optimism is essential for a doctor. He must believe the very interesting study of social conditions called the " Came] best, and so he goes half-way to effecting it. We have known and the Needle’s Eye"" Mr. Ponsonby observes that"in all for all time that the cheery man was the healing man, but professions, arts, trades, and crafts, the fixing of a limi1 now in hypnotic suggestion we come upon the physical within which to operate, is the secret of the attainment of a explanation of the fact. If you can convey the expectation high quality of work, because it is the recognition of humar of cure you have served your patient well. You need not go limitations." But dwelling upon a wider culture thar the lengths of a doctor I knew, who used to say to his that which may be had from professionalism, the culture neurotic and hysterical cases,’Now, Miss So-and-So, yon which aims at the realisation of ideal manhood, I have will take three doses of the medicine, and then watch the had the privilege of recommending to you, I know you wil clock till it is quarter-past five, and at that instant all pardon me if, as I conclude, I remind you that the your troubles will disappear.’ It is true that his prophecy æsthetic powers are allied to that highest and most was often fulfilled, and yet the method was perhaps a little complete mode of embodying all that is beautiful, all that if crude for general use. With a knowledge of medicine you will find that you bear true, and all that is good, we call God. To combine thes< with you a little private lantern which throws a light of its three ideals, the ideals of science, art, and ethics in on< It illuminates many an incident which is dark to the to whici own. supreme unity is to set before ourselves an object out

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