H747 P4M4 1874 GENTLEMEN-ALUMNI OF THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT I am fully sensible of the honor you have conferred in calling me to the position I now occupy, and I appear before you with a feeling which I cannot readily express. The grateful recollections of a wellremembered past, together with the glad emotions of the hopeful and auspicious present, press upon my mind, and rouse a crowded train of swelling thoughts, which language is inadequate to utter. In the assembly here to-day convened, I see no ordinary gathering of ordinary men. It is the voluntary gathering of loving children in the hall and by the hearth of the maternal mansion, once again to pay their homage at the altar of their common mother; it is a reunion of the widely-scattered sons of this renowned school of the art of healing-the oldest and most venerated of the schools of medicine upon the continent of America. It is well that we should meet to do her honor; for to her we owe the nurture of our intellectual infancy, and the direction of the higher studies of our youth; and now, amid the grave responsibilities of manhood we still feel the strengthening protection of her influence. To-day w meet and mingle with each other upon terms of perfect brotherly equality. To-day the hoary-headed elder, laden with the ripe rewards of life-long study and experience, honored with the admiration and affection of his brethren and the world, comes to the mother's home to give the hand of welcome and congratulation to her youngest son standing, with all the eager flush and fervor of highhearted youth, upon the threshold of professional life. This is an occasion to be held most sacred by both old and young, because it is devoted to the utterance of love and gratitude to her who is the mother of us all, and to the indulgence of a thousand memories of toil and struggle, failure and achievement, joy and pain. Let it be remembered, gentlemen, that I address you as the Alumni of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania—a society whose object is to further and sustain the interests and usefulness of the University, by cherishing a general sentiment of brotherhood among her graduates, and by aiding every effort that she makes to elevate the standard of medical education, or to advance the progress of our science. It is no part of our purpose, in assembling here to-day, to pass encomiums upon ourselves, nor to exalt even our honored mother, by insinuating the inferiority of other institutions which are occupied in the same noble work. This school acknowledges itself to be but one of the great family of schools of science; and this association is but one of many brotherhoods of medical alumni, who are striving to promote the usefulness and honor of our profession. Nevertheless, while gladly recognizing all their varied and unquestioned merits, we may be excused in such an hour as this, when gathered in our own old home around the family board, if we rejoice to magnify the venerable age, the unstained reputation, and the envied standing of this institution, which, by every right, commands the first place in our hearts, to which we have been bound by ties so close and so enduring, and in the future of whose greatness we, of all men, are so deeply interested. Holding in our hand her spotless record, it is our happy privilege to feel that we desire her history hereafter to be but a just development of what has gone before, so that the ever opening pages of the future may continue to be lighted, as they now are, by a bright reflection from the past. It therefore seems to me a fitting moment to review the past days of our Alma Mater, to congratulate ourselves upon her present, and to linger for a moment in the contemplation of the future. |