ADDRESS OF D. W. YANDELL, M. D., PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION. GENTLEMEN: The migratory character of our Association is one of its best features. If it were stationary its meetings would no doubt be attended by many, and it would, while conducted with wisdom and moderation, exert a good influence upon the profession all over the country. But its influence is incalculably enhanced by its journeyings from point to point. In this way multitudes are brought into sympathy with it who otherwise would never attend one of its meetings or read a page of its proceedings. Whatever else may be denied the Association, no one can hesitate to admit that it is grand in its annual migrations. No other medical body ever in the same time traversed spaces so vast. Last year we met on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and sat with the sound of the many-voiced Pacific in our ears. This year we have assembled on the eastern side of the Alleghenies, and our foreheads are bathed in the gales of the Atlantic. None of us who were privileged to be present at that meeting in San Francisco can ever forget the circumstances attending it. We were introduced to a new world; trees, birds, quadrupeds of new species; an empire which, though the growth of but a quarter of a century, excites the wonder and admiration of mankind. If the novelty of the scene rendered our meeting in California one of peculiar interest, the meeting here is not less interesting on account of the historical associations of the city in which we are convened. San Francisco is the most recently erected of all our great cities. Philadelphia is the most ancient of all our great medical centres. It is, in a sense, the cradle of American Medicine. Here medical teaching was formally inaugurated on this continent. We seem to hear again this morning the confident words of Dr. John Morgan, spoken one hundred and seven years ago, as he pleaded for the medical independence of the colonies, and proved to the satisfaction of the citizens of Philadelphia that the time had come when America should have medical school of her own. That first faculty, composed of Morgan, Kuhn, Shippen, Bond, and Rush, rises to our mind as we enter on our duties here to-day. The old-school, elegant Shippen, sitting, not very gracefully, on his three chairs, and essaying to teach anatomy, and surgery, and midwifery. The rigid, stately Adam Kuhn, his hands and bosom in ruffles, his exuberant hair done up by his hair-dresser in the style of an imposing wig, presenting with his gold-headed cane a perfect picture of the grave doctor of the preceding age; punctual to the half minute-beginning his lectures just as the clock pealed its last stroke; waiting for the physician who was to meet him in consultation the five minutes of grace, then stalking out of the sick-room, perhaps to encounter his tardy brother on the stairway or the door-steps, but hardly pausing long enough to hear the delinquent's excuse, and never turning back. Rigidly exact in his prescriptions, he has just ordered a patient some weak sage-tea. The kindly nurse meekly suggests, as he walks away, "I suppose, doctor, I may give the patient a little toast-water, or lemonade, too, if she craves it?" And we see him turning round with the solemnity of one who seemed to feel that life hung upon his words, and hear his incisive reply, "I have said sage-tea; good morning, madam." And how strangely sounds to us that declaration of the old professor of practice made near the close of his life: "If called upon to say with what remedies I have done most good in my long practice, I should name the volatile alkali and wine whey." But in that group of professors, untried as yet, rises far above the rest that figure so familiar to us all, with its meditative face and calm, expansive brow, the philosophic, active-minded Rush. He has just returned from Edinburgh, where he listened to the lectures and enjoyed the friendship of the great Cullen. In all the five years of his pupilage he tells us he never wasted a day in amusement. He has entered into his profession with his whole soul. At the early age of twenty-four he has been elected professor of chemistry. We pursue his steps along his brilliant course as statesman, philanthropist, physician, author; a signer of the Declaration of Independence; a writer on temperance, on insanity, on medical education; author of medical histories so full and graphic that he is soon styled "the American Sydenham." We see him, year after year, battling with the fever that devastated his city, and with his brethren about calomel and jalap and bloodletting. We read with absorbing interest his accounts of the wasting epidemic, and are thrilled by a passage in his diary, entered at the close of one of his terrible days, just after adopting a new mode of practice: "I have visited one hundred patients' today, and, thank God! not one of them has died." His terse, sagacious remarks, repeated everywhere by his pupils till they became household words with the people, come back to us as we meet here where he was so long the master-spirit of the profession. Consulted by our grandfathers in Charleston, in Georgia, in the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, he was acknowledged everywhere the head of the profession in America. Students flocked to him as they had done before to Cullen at Edinburgh and to Boerhaave at Leyden. Sitting here in his chair of theory and practice, he gave laws, as nearly as physicians could ever give law, to the profession of a continent, and has left behind him a name the most resounding in our medical annals. With Rush, after a time, was Caspar Wistar in anatomy, which his eloquence made attractive. No medical man can hear Philadelphia named and not think of Wistar, whose work on anatomy, the first work on the subject by an American, was long a textbook in all our medical schools. Physick too rises among the great names that gave renown to the school at a later period. Cold in manner, unsocial, but grand in the simplicity of his character, he walked the streets of Philadelphia five years, as he has told us, before he made money enough to pay for his shoeleather. And with him is associated the name of his nephew, Dorsey, author of the first American system of surgery, who, unfortunately for the profession, was cut off in his early prime. Prominent among the foremost was one whom many of you have seen, the first President of our Association-the generous, witty, genial, eloquent Chapman, upon whom fell the mantle of Rush when that great man left the earth. You who saw him at Baltimore twenty-four years ago, as he stood up to deliver his inaugural address, can never forget his form, his face, his voice, his whole. bearing and manner as that of one who felt that the dignity of a great profession rested on him. In this city too lived for a short. time, adorning the profession by his varied labors, the brilliant Godman, at once physician, poet, and philosopher; but, like Dorsey, dying young. The last link which bound the present with the past has just |