Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 4 (of 7)

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.