"A new era in medicine has been marked by a new science, depending on the immutable laws of physical phenomena, and, like the discoveries founded on such a basis, simple in its application and easily understood--a gift of science to a favored son; one by which the ear is converted into the eye, the hidden recesses of visceral disease open to view; a new guide to the treatment, and a new help to the ready detection, prevention and cure of the most widely spread diseases which affect mankind." Dr. Addison, who is best known by the disease which since his original description has been called by his name, was no less enthusiastic in praise of Laennec's work. He said: "Were I to affirm that Laennec contributed more toward the advancement of the medical art than any other single individual, either of ancient or of modern times, I should probably be advancing a proposition which, in the estimation of many, is neither extravagant nor unjust. His work, {137} _De l'Auscultation Mediate_, will ever remain a monument of genius, industry, modesty and truth. It is a work in perusing which every succeeding page only tends to increase our admiration of the man, to captivate our attention, and to command our confidence. We are led insensibly to the bedside of his patients; we are startled by the originality of his system; we can hardly persuade ourselves that any means so simple can accomplish so much, can overcome and reduce to order the chaotic confusion of thoracic pathology; and hesitate not in the end to acknowledge our unqualified wonder at the triumphant confirmation of all he professed to accomplish." These tributes to Laennec, however, from men who were his contemporaries across the channel, have been more than equalled by distinguished physicians on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. While we might hesitate to accept the opinions of those who had been so close to him at the beginning of the new era of physical diagnosis, there can be no doubt now, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, of what Laennec's influence really was, and the tributes of the twentieth century place him among the few great geniuses to whom scientific medicine owes its most important advance. At the annual meeting of the State Medical Society of New York held in Albany at the end of January, 1903, the president of the society, Doctor Henry L. Elsner, of Syracuse, in his annual address devoted some paragraphs to a panegyric of Laennec. He wished to call attention to what had been accomplished for scientific medicine at the beginning of the last century by a simple observant practitioner. In the course of his references to Laennec and his work he said: