had never given any commission to a lawyer to preach the gospel, either in public or in private. [Applause.]

But the Saviour himself was the Great Physician, and all who reach highest in the profession in healing become likest unto God.

In one particular your profession has a great advantage over the lawyers-your victims never reproach you like ours do for the loss of the case. Is it "because dead men tell no tales"?

But enough.

Has the science of medicine kept pace with the progress of the world? The Lancet a few days ago announced that after careful calculations recently made in England, it is found that the mean duration of human life has been increased during the last fifty years as much as four years for man and five years for woman. A generation, therefore, is now over thirty-seven years. The Lancet says this is entirely due to the medical profession. It specifies as the principal reasons the increased facilities for taking care of the young and the better knowledge of the laws of health as applied to the earlier stages of life. A larger number now pass successfully from infancy to manhood and womanhood than ever before. Suppose this should go on for five hundred years; all people born in the world would live out their allotted time.

The laws of health are being taught as they never were before, and the secrets of nature are daily wrung from her cabinets of rock and vegetable to pay tribute to man's wants for relieving pain and securing health. An educated physician is to-day a walking arsenal, a wonder and a mystery. He is entitled to be looked upon in some such light as the Indian looks upon his medicine man.

So jealous is your profession of all helps in the practice that no new discovery is made without at once attracting the attention and commanding the interest of your learned men. Great brains are laboring on independent lines with the problems involved in the preservation of human life. The discoveries of science intended to add conveniences to life would amount to very little if life itself were not preserved. Consequently every age of knowledge is being harnessed to the car of Esculapius. The evolution

and disclosure of the hidden laws in the domain of physical phenomena, the unveiling of nature's profoundest mysteries, the location and definition of all her wonderful agencies are made tributary to the work of the physician and the surgeon. Who can estimate the effect which that wonderful spark from the Crookes tube, giving birth to the Roentgen ray, is destined to have on the future practice of medicine and surgery? It has already revolutionized the diagnosis of disease and opens a thousand unknown avenues for its treatment and cure in the future. The splendors which hang about the names of Paul Eve, of Sims and of Westmoreland, our own peerless Southern physicians and surgeons, may be dimmed by the careers of many young men who are in this audience to-day, under the new régime destined to commence at the opening of the coming century. There is nothing too hard for the profession. [Applause.]

As the physician develops under that great law of the survival of the fittest, the demand of the times will produce men best suited to grapple with the truths of the profession and carry it forward to the highest possible develop

ment.

One of the former presidents of your medical association tells a story to illustrate the methods pursued in the healing art in former generations. In these early times the motto was "kill or cure," and one or the other was pretty apt to result. An old quack doctor who lived near Griffin manufactured for himself an ivory ball containing eight or ten facets or sides, upon which sides were written certain remedies thought to be effective in certain conditions of the body. He called the ball his tee-totum. When he was sent for to see a patient, he would take occasion to step aside in some quiet place where he was not seen and toss his ball up in the air. As one of the sides stood upward he read what was on it and used the remedy for the sick patient. He achieved wonderful success. On one occasion he was called on to attend a gentleman who had swallowed a fish bone that had lodged in his throat. This was beyond the reach of the old gentleman's skill, as he had never prescribed for a fish bone, but he went out into the garden and taking his ball threw it up into the air.

When it came down he read on the face that turned up, "Mush poultice on the soles of the feet." Accordingly he went in and told the gentleman's wife to prepare a mush poultice and put it on the soles of her husband's feet. When the sick gentleman heard his prescription he was sc overcome with the ridiculousness of the idea that he began to laugh very heartily, and in laughing coughed up the bone. The old doctor threw his hat up in the air and exclaimed: "The tee-totum forever; it has never failed yet." [Laughter.]

The profession has passed beyond this stage, I am proud

to say.

You call your ancient practitioners "old fogies" now, you brilliant young lights who are just from the halls of our splendid universities. But I will be sorry when the old race is dead. They have constituted a noble body of our citizenship. Take the country doctor, who is fast becoming obsolete in these latter days of horseless carriages and bicycles and railroads which have brought the city and the country so close together. There is no class of our population for whom I have a profounder admiration than these old country doctors. I remember them as I saw them in my childhood, the friend of all classes, the friend of humanity. What braver men on earth have ever been known? They listen to no calls save that of duty. The night is never too dark for their journey, the day never too hot or stormy. With their lives in their hands they hasten at every summons to the bedside of physical pain-over swollen streams, through swamp marsh and rank grass, wet with the dews and dripping with the rain-in the forests where rank pools send out mephitic breath and the typhus lurks in its reeking home, or in the mountains where the cool breath of the north freezes the icicles on the beard and chills the marrow in the bones-always they go forth bravely and without hesitation at the call of duty to suffering humanity.

And so it is with the true physician everywhere. Perils by the road do not daunt him, perils by the storm cannot hold him, perils by robbers, by fire and flood only call up his manhood and set his duty in a plainer light before his eyes. Into the dens of fever, into the regions of infection he goes like a minister of heaven, carrying relief from pain

and from physical suffering to the wan and pinched victims of disease. No thought of compensation ever stays his footsteps or even hastens his coming. He is the accredited ambassador from the palace of health, and in his hands he bears the torch of comfort to the weary and the heavy laden, while his evangel is to the lowly as well as to the exalted in station and life. [Applause.]

Self-sacrificing heroes ye are, in the mighty army of benevolence, who shall write the history of your deeds or picture your unfaltering devotion to the suffering children of humanity? How many of these brave men like those I have described live obscure lives and die unknown and fill the humble graves of our lands, whose deeds of love, charity and self-devotion, if they were gathered up, would blazon the pages of humanity's record with a glory that would not pale before the splendors of all the war-laurelled heroes of earth, or lose a single ray in the glory of the mightiest chieftains that ever led the armies of nations to conquest and to victory.

"So it is with your noble profession, my friends;

And so it will ever be still;

There are some who appreciate its labors,

And some, perhaps, who never will.

"But in the great time that is coming, when loudly the trumpet. shall sound,

And they who have labored and rested shall come from the quivering ground;

When they who have striven and suffered to bless and ennoble the

race

Shall march at the front of the column, each one in his Godgiven

place,

As they pass through the gates of the city, with proud and victorious tread,

The doctor, the surgeon and helper, will travel not far from the head."

[Applause.]

I suppose I was selected to deliver this address of welcome more on account of my relationship to the profession than for any power of expression or wisdom of thought pos

sible to me. My father was a physician. Although he has long since left the earth, yet his life, as I look back upon it, is a benediction to me to-day as it was always to his family when he lived. His practice was scattered over the little county where I was born till he became an army surgeon and in the war passed the last years of his life. When I think of his untiring devotion to his duties, call back the memory of his ever cheerful face, his kindly heart always worn upon his sleeve, the easy prey of every one who wished to take advantage of him, his readiness to go at all hours of the night or day, in all kinds of weather, at the call of any one in pain or suffering, carrying his worn saddle-bags with the little store of medicines always at hand, replenished from time to time at the expense of his slender purse from the village drug store, keeping no record of his work save now and then a stray memorandum on the back of a letter or some fugitive piece of paper torn from a book, yet thankfully receiving anything his patients might pay him, healing more for the sake of the pleasure he got out of it than for the money that was in it; and then when I recall him, as I often do, bending over the sick-beds of his suffering patients, trying with all his skill to relieve them, in extreme cases sitting up through long weary nights watching the crisis of some awful malady, ready at any moment to take advantage of every favorable turn in the disease, or if his skill should prove all unavailing, speeding the souls of his patients out into the great unknown on the wings of his prayers, then tenderly closing the eyes of the dead and paying the last rites of sepulture, for the sake of those who survived; when I recall all these memories, looking in your faces to-day, I feel indeed how high and lofty is that profession which can produce such men as he will always be to me, and I thank God for the portrait that will ever hang on the walls of the heart's secret laboratory, where filial love is refined and sublimated through the alembic of God's mysterious processes of life.

In the name of the city of Macon, in the name of its mayor and council and of all its people, I welcome you to their hospitable homes and turn over to you the freedom of this Central City of your State. [Applause.]