I. In memoriam, Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., D.C.L. II. Sturges lecture for 1897 / by George Cowell.

  • Cowell, George, 1836-1927.
Date:
[1897]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: I. In memoriam, Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., D.C.L. II. Sturges lecture for 1897 / by George Cowell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    STURGES LECTURE. Delivered before the Guthrie Society, Westminster Hospital, November 11th, 1897. By GEORGE COWELL, F.R.C.S., Vice-President and Consulting Surgeon of the Hospital. My first duty, gentlemen, is to thank you for the honour that you have conferred upon me in inviting me this year to read the Sturges Lecture before the Guthrie Society. It is an honour and privilege that I thoroughly appreciate. I have a lively recollection of the great interest that the late Dr. Sturges took in the founding of the Society. I re- member, too, that he occupied the presidential chair during the first two years of its existence, and thus fostered its early infancy in a way that no other man could have done. He fixed upon the Society the impress of his great modesty of mind, his love of truth, his refinement of diction, his charity of judgment, his liberal-hearted toleration, and his deep devotion to scientific observation and research. All these (qualities the Society inherits, as it were, from Sturges; and the Sturges Lecture, I take it, was founded as an expression of esteem and gratitude on the part of the members to keep alive the example he held up to us, to impress upon us again and again the motives and pi’inciples of action which he taught us, and to keep green the remembrance of the affec- tion in which he was held by all who were proud to be his fellow-students in the art and science which he loved so well. His departure from amongst us is at present too recent for it to be necessary for me further to speak of him. In a few years’ time the Sturges Lecturer will have the grateful task of using what eloquence he possesses to make Sturges known to succeeding members of this Society; men who have not had the advantage and happiness of his personal acquaintance, a possession which is a very real one to most of us who are present to-night.