To do us poor patients justice, we do not often dispute doctors’ orders unless we are frightened or upset by a long continuance of epidemic diseases. In that case, if we are uncivilised, we say that you have poisoned the drinking water for your own purpose, and we turn out and throw stones at you in the street. If we are civilised, we do something else. But a civilised people can throw stones too. You have been, and always will be exposed to the contempt of the gifted amateur--the gentleman who knows by intuition everything that it has taken you years to learn. You have been exposed--you always will be exposed--to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world’s most bitter agonies--the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering. But you have heard this afternoon a little of the history of your profession. You will find that such people have been with you--or rather against you--from the very beginning, ever since, I should say, the earliest Egyptians erected images in honour of cats and dogs on the banks of the Nile. Yet your work goes on, and will go on. You remain now perhaps the only class that dares to tell the world that we can get no more out of a machine than we put into it; that if the fathers have eaten forbidden fruit the children’s teeth are very liable to be affected. Your training shows you daily and directly that things are what they are, and that their consequences will be what they will be and that we deceive no one but ourselves when we pretend otherwise. Better still you can prove what you have learned. If a patient chooses to disregard your warnings, you have not to wait for a generation to convince him. You know you will be called in in a few days or weeks, and you will find your careless friend with a pain in his inside, or a sore place on his body, precisely as you warned him would be the case. Have you ever considered what a tremendous privilege that is? At a time when few things are called by their right names, when it is against the spirit of the times even to hint that an act may entail consequences--you are going to join a profession in which you will be paid for telling men the truth, and every departure you may make from the truth you will make as a concession to man’s bodily weakness, and not his mental weakness. Realising these things, as I have had good reason to realise them, I do not think I need stretch your patience by talking to you about the high ideals and the lofty ethics of a profession which exacts from its followers the largest responsibility and the highest death-rate--for its practitioners--of any profession in the world. If you will let me, I will wish you in your future what all men desire--enough work to do, and strength enough to do your work. R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.