"Doctor Holmes was forced to make some recognition of these slanders addressed to the uninformed, credulous and gullible portion of our community. He would have been generally censured if he had passed them by. The only question for him and for a critically judging community would concern the true spirit and way in which he should recognize them. We can conceive of no more fitting and effective course than that which the sagacious doctor followed. The occasion was one in which it was for him, in defining and greeting the steady advance made during a century in medical and surgical science among us, to remind his hearers that those to whom we are indebted for this advancement, have had, with their own noble, personal devotion and effort, to triumph over and fight their way against all the prejudices and obstructions which popular ignorance, prejudice and superstition have engaged to annoy and withstand them. In scarcely any one of the multiplied interests of average society have popular weaknesses and follies more mischievously asserted themselves than in opposition to hospitals and medical schools. When that noble institution, the Massachusetts General Hospital, was devised, about three quarters of a century ago, the most besotted folly and suspicion were engaged against those who planned and fostered it. It was charged that under the guise of benevolent service for homeless sufferers and for the victims of accident or special maladies, it was really to be artfully used for the trial of new medicines and risky experiments on the poor and humble, that practitioners might have the benefit of the knowledge thus gained in dealing with their rich patients. Let any one visit the wards of that institution to-day, or read its annual reports, noting the thousands of cases of its work of mercy in restoration or relief of all classes of sufferers, and then recall the asinine abuse visited upon its projectors. The millions of money which have been poured into its treasury, mostly from the private benevolence of our own citizens, is the crown of glory for that institution. An appeal of the most artful and atrocious sort to this same popular ignorance and passion has been made this year for purposes which we need not search the dictionary to characterize with fitting epithets. How could Doctor Holmes on this great occasion pass it by? How could he have treated the offence and the offender with a more fitting combination of wit and scorn? Most happy also was his suggestive allusion to the self mastery by which practitioners at the dissecting table have to control, in the interest of their high service, revulsions and shrinkings incident to disgusting offices unknown even to chambermaids and stable boys.