The relations of the medical profession to the state : Being the anniversary discourse delivered before the Medical Society of the State of New York, February fifth, 1879. / By D.B. St. John Roosa, M.D., President of the Society.

  • Roosa, D. B. St. John (Daniel Bennett St. John), 1838-1908.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The relations of the medical profession to the state : Being the anniversary discourse delivered before the Medical Society of the State of New York, February fifth, 1879. / By D.B. St. John Roosa, M.D., President of the Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    THE RELATIONS MEDICAL PROFESSION TO THE STATE. The country in which we live is still a new one. Many of our forests are primitive and much of our soil is uncultivated. Even in our oldest States we may see regions upon which man, by his residence and labor, seems hardly to have made a sensible effect. We have scarcely any of the garden-like cultivation of England, we have no wood-parks like Ardennes and Fontaine- bleau, no gray towers on our river banks, and few of the broad and hard highways over which Moltke's armies marched to Sedan and Paris. In our vast country there is a constantly recurring impression of newness, and, in a certain sense, of roughness. I am not unmindful of what we have achieved in the way of invention, manufacture, commerce, and culture. I merely wish to recall to your minds a fact that we are all per- haps inclined to forget, namely, that we are still a new people in a new land. We cannot inherit the fullness of cultivation of the older peoples in our intellectual work any more than in the cultivation of our soil. Our relations as individuals or as guilds and professions, to each other and to the government, must of necessity be different from those which obtain among older nations with their centuries of history and of tradition. In Europe there has been time for many things to arrange themselves into a refined system. The profession of medicine