An Address on the Maintenance of the Honour and Respectability of the Medical Profession
Authors: E. Crossman
Journal: BMJ (1883)

ENTLEMEN,-The post I have ventured to accept at your invitation is one of no small honour, but it is one of great bility.Our Association having net in annual assembly, and ered together the fragments up to date, disperses into Branches the year, committing to the presidents and officers of stewardship of its interests until returning time reunites all again.. The year gone by has been our jubilee, and now we start again.to work; our motto always Onward."But few of us can toee another fifty years-yet let us hope that each in his way -will lay some little stone in the great fabric.Amongst the several objects contemplated by the founders Association, we find " maintenance of the honour and respectability of the profession generally in the provinces, by promoting intercourse and free communication of its members, and lishing among them the harmony and good feeling which ever to characterise a liberal profession."It is satisfactory able to reflect, at the end of fifty years, that at no time in the tory of the Association has it been more thoroughly united ing or pervaded by a more active sentiment of fraternal and social and scientific fellowship; and that in great measure the influence of this Association we owe it that, great as the' advance made during the last fifty years in the scientific pur-.suits of the profession, equally great has been the rank and standing.History tells us of the barber-surgeon, the empirical .or- apothecary; and our President last year drew an amusing figure the provincial physician of former times: "as with solemn and well poised cane he descended from his lumbering postchaise at the door of some opulent patient.The arrival of it some country town was, quite an event, and a signal blind, and halt, and lame, to turn out literally for a great man's hand.Those who could pay, pulled out their.guineas; those who could not, might perhaps count upon getting glance and a word from the 'Great Doctor,' as he was called.passed through the admiring crowd to his carriage in courtyard of the inn, his grand and pompous manner denoted that he felt himself a head and shoulders taller than the poor apothecary, who' stood by meekly trying, to catch at the incontrovertible fell from the mouth of the medical oracle."The social history of our profession is one of alternate fall.The origin of the healing art, probably coeval with Kace, was traced in classic times to Apollo; and Esculapius, the son Qr descendant of Apollo, became to the Greeks their god Iachaon and Podalirius, the sons of Esculapius, are represented exercising the art of surgery at the siege of Troy; so that, at time, medicine took the position of a divine art.But in the of Homer, on the other hand, although there remained knowledge of anatomy, the art and position of the little above that of the butcher.With Hippocrates (B.c.400), a great step in advance was made again, for he wrote treatises, in which he described important operations conducted a manner little behind that of the present day.The for., ward was made by the Alexandrian school (n.C. 300), whom was Ammonius the lithotomist.And then re, lapse; for at Rome,, the first who cultivated slaves, and these, being permitted to establish public ated medicine, and especially surgery, with bath-keeping bering.. Once more, after an interval, medicine and surgery studied.as a soelence; for, about the time of the Christian Celsu^s upoa thefieli.whose works are.great advance those of Hippocrates..I'. a well known passage; Celsus thus