It may be as well to say that the doctor's degree or diploma was a license to practise. There were no State regulations for the practice of medicine, and no matter how obtained, a diploma allowed practise. As some one has well said the diploma, then, was a license to practise, not medicine, the Lord knows! but to practise on one's patients until one had learned some medicine. It is out of this slough of despond in medical education that we have climbed in the last thirty-five years. We are getting back to the {373} old-time university traditions. Let us hope that we shall not allow ourselves to get away from them again. There are ups and downs in medical practice and medical fashions and medical education, and all depends on the men who compose the profession at any one time and not on any mythical progress that holds them up and compels them to do better than those who went before them. The highest compliment that can be paid to American medicine and medical men is that, in spite of this handicap of education they did not utterly degenerate, but, on the contrary, somehow managed to maintain the dignity of the profession and do much good work. It is to you to-day, entering on this profession, that we look to do your share in keeping up the dignity of the medical profession and in maintaining standards in medical education. We have a glorious tradition of 6,000 years behind us with the great men of the profession worshipped as gods at the beginning, because men thought so much of them, and remembered fondly as great masters when they came in the after-time. From I-em-Hetep through AEsculapius and Hippocrates and Galen and Guy de Chauliac and Sydenham and Boerhaave down to our own time, the men whom we delight to honor are the ones who did not work with an eye single to their own success, but who tried, above all, to do things for humanity and for the profession to which they belonged. The man who is successful as a {374} money-maker in his profession is only doing half his duty. He must make medicine as well as money, that is, he must by his observations help others to recognize and treat disease better than they did before; he must labor for the benefit of humanity, and, above all, he must see that there are no decadence of professional spirit and no deterioration of medical education as far as his influence can go. It is men of this kind that we hope to send forth from Fordham, and you stand in the van of them all, and I wish you God-speed. {375} UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOLS {376} "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers." --Tennyson, _Locksley Hall_. "The foundation stones of the whole modern structure of human wisdom have all been laid by the architects of yesterday. Thrice wise is he who knows the quarries and builders of by-gone ages and is able to differentiate the stones which have been rejected from those which have been utilized." --Anon.