An Address ON SCIENCE AND MEDICINE IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY: Delivered to the Toronto University Trustees and Senators and to the Medical Profession of Ontario and their Guests on the Occasion of the Opening of the New Medical Buildings of the United Faculties of Toronto and Trinity Universities
Authors: C. S. Sherrington
Journal: BMJ (1903)

BELIEVE me2 it is a difficult thing for a stranger, even at your invitation, to address you on an occasion like the present.So many significant events crowd in upon him, and time for reflection is needed to weld into a connected whole the impression he would wish to offer to you.Not that the growth and doings of this University have not been followed and watched witt interest by us in the Old Country.On the contrary, your activity has been felt not only as a matter of mutual congratulation, but as a spur to arouse us to effort in our own similar pursuit of educational aims.But the stranger coming among you necessarily feels the short- -comings of his acquaintance with the details of these academic enterprises you have taken in hand.One advantage, however, is his.His view, gained from a dis- tance, necessarily has freedom and truth of perspective that may give it a value in your eyes.Some things lose by perspective.Some things, large when -close at hand, dwindle when viewed from afar.Not so Canada.The perspective given by the width of the Atlantic is but an appropriate setting across which to view her great- ness and her far-reaching activity.And this event, this .acaiemiccelebration, this dies festus, in your University to- day retains from afar off all the significance of a great event.It loses no tittle of its dignity and import when viewed across ocean from the crowded turrets of the older Cambridge or the hoary spires of Oxford.It shines, I assure you, like a beacon to the new University whose buildings are as yet unfinished on the hill above the port of Liverpool.Coming from a region where history is long and the land little to this, where written history is short and the expanse of land incomparably great, one realizes how relative is size.And in regard to the event of to-day, the largeness of this country rises in my thought, not as a matter o' mileage, but because with you more than with us in the old country the size of to-morrow is vaster than the size of to-day.Each step of progress here, more than with us, has to be measured by its ample consequences in a more rapidly-widening horizon -of the morrow.These new laboratories have a field already demanding them, and a still larger lies before them in an immediate and historic future.PURSUIT OF SCIENCE A CIvIc DUTY.Biology is the study of life in regard especially to growth and organization.Every medical man is a biologist, and as a biologist it may be but natural if I regard to-day's event from a biological standpoint, and the community as an organism, and the university as a living organ, essential to ¢he healthy life of the community.Science, especially medical science, is growing in im- portance to the community.We must have organization in science as in industry.This University to-day makes pro- visions of first-rate importance for the organization of medical and allied sciences in the region which centres here.Capacity to rear and support men constitutes the extent of a country, -and population is the biological measure of the social organism.The ceaseless energy of the race has begun to