My principal duty and intense pleasure is to tender my thanks to the House of Delegates which selected me for the highest honor in the gift of the medical profession of America, and to my colleagues of all the fifty states who were good enough to approve of its choice. Nor am I under less obligation for their attendance on this occasion to such citizens, men and women, as by their presence here exhibit their interest in things medical and socio-political. My everlasting gratitude is due for the mode in which this great honor was conferred on me. Being duly aware of the small measure of my merits, I was overjoyed to have reason to believe that I owed my election to my lack of efforts to secure it. My democratic training and the gentlemanly nature of thirty-five thousand members of the American Medical Association, like the principled citizens of all parties, resent electioneering importunities and abhor the humiliation and demoralization caused by gesticulating and shouting candidates for office and honor. I have the confidence that if there be in this or any other cultured assembly anybody looking for the highest-office for the sake of power und preferment only, he will be deservedly disappointed. Whoever sets out to be the first, let him be the last. There is only one thing that is and must forever remain first-that is the medical profession of America, as represented in this American Medical Association, and its object, which in all its aims is only one and indivisible. That one and inseparable object is to promote the art and science of medicine, to unite into one compact organization the medical profession of the United States for the purpose of fostering the growth and the diffusion of medical knowledge, of promoting friendly intercourse among American physicians, of safeguarding the mate
knowledge of transatlantic medicine and medical men. That is why I have to ask the pardon both of my countrymen and of all of you, but mainly of the French gentlemen here assembled, for using\p=m-\or,perhaps, misusing \p=m-\a language not my own, but better known to most of you than mine. In this way I hope to serve the ideal of the International Congress, which admits the delegates of medicine from all over the globe, recognize three languages as equivalent, listen to contributions on all possible topics connected with medicine and its numerous tributaries that are offered by the glory-crowned heads of the profession and by those on whose shoulders, now young, will rest the future of medical science and practice, and thus give an example of cosmopolitanism, the universal realization of which must be left to the coming century.Many millions of the population of the United States are European immigrants or their offspring; commercial interests between the two hemispheres are numerous, and there is a daily intercourse through correspondence, telegrams and travelers; the French and German languages are much studied in America, but while European literature is copiously imported into our country, our own is not so well known in Europe. Even European governments send to us representatives to study economical, mechanical and agricultural questions. But it appears that there are difficulties as regards the international appreciation of what concerns American medicine and medical men. Possibly it is because the intercourse between medical men is not sufficiently extensive and long. When our best men come to Europe it is for the purpose of rest; you find, unfortunately, but few of the great-mostly older--men at the international congresses. That of Washington in 1887 was not much frequented by Europeans for reasons satisfactory to themselves. Our young physicians and students who flock to European universities are not and should not be taken as fair representatives of American medicine. Your own great or well-informed men rarely come to us to see with their own eyes. Books on general American topics, like that of the superficial and clumsy L. Buechner, of Germany, or that of the ignorant and shallow, though elegant Bourget, of France, written after a few weeks' limited observations with narrow opportunities, are more apt to obscure the mental view than enlighten the mind. The spirit of de Tocqueville is no longer alive in the tourist.
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