We are very prone in the modern time to think that what we are doing in each successive generation is of so much greater significance than what was accomplished before our time that it is really scarcely worth while to give much attention to the past. This self-sufficient complacency with regard to the present would be quite unbearable only that each successive generation in its turn has had the same tendency and has expiated its fault by being thought little of by subsequent generations. We shall have our turn with those we affect to despise. It is supposed to be particularly true in every department of science and, above all, in medicine that there is such a wide chasm between what we are doing now and what was accomplished by our forebears, no matter how intelligent they were in the long ago, that to occupy ourselves seriously with the history of medicine may be a pleasant occupation for an elderly physician who has nothing better to do, but can mean very little for the young man entering upon practice or for the physician busy with his patients. Medical history may be good enough for some book-worm interested in dry-as-dust details for their own sake and perhaps because he rejoices in the fact that other people do not know them, but can have very little significance for the up-to-date physician. This is an impression that is dying hard just now, but it is dying. We are learning that there is very little that we are {353} doing even now that has not been done before us and that, above all, the great physicians, no matter how long ago they wrote, always have precious lessons for us that we cannot afford to neglect, even though they be 300 or 600 or 1,800 or even 2,500 years ago. At all of these dates in the past there were physicians whose works will never die.