"It is by no means to be considered an accident that, {138} among the greatest advances in medicine made during the century just closed, the introduction of pathological anatomy and auscultation into the practice of medicine at the bedside were both effected by the same clear mind, Laennec. He is one of the greatest physicians of all time." He then quoted the opinion of a distinguished English clinician, Professor T. Clifford Allbutt, who is well known, especially for his knowledge of the history of medicine. Professor Allbutt is the Regius Professor of Physic (a term about equivalent to our practice of medicine) of Cambridge University, England, and was invited to this country some years ago as the representative of English medicine to deliver the Lane lectures in San Francisco. During his stay in this country he delivered a lecture at Johns Hopkins University on "Medicine in the Nineteenth Century," in which he said, "Laennec gives me the impression of being one of the greatest physicians in history; one who deserves to stand by the side of Hippocrates and Galen, Harvey and Sydenham. Without the advances of pathology Laennec's work could not have been done; it was a revelation of the anatomy of the internal organs during the life of the patient." René Theodore Hyacinthe Laennec, who is thus conceded by twentieth century medicine a place among the world's greatest medical discoverers, was born February 17, 1781, at Quimper in Bretagne, that rocky province at the north of France which has been the sturdy nursing mother of so many pure Celtic Frenchmen who have so mightily influenced the thought not only of their own country but of all the world. The names of such Bretons as Renan and Lamennais have a universal reputation and the province was even more distinguished for its scientists. There was published [Footnote 2] a few years ago in France a detailed {139} history of Breton physicians. This work sketches the lives of the physicians of Breton birth from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Only those of the nineteenth century concern us, but the list even for this single century includes such distinguished names as Broussais, whose ideas in physiology dominated medicine for nearly the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century; Jobert, the famous French surgeon whose reputation was world-wide; Alphonse Guerin, another distinguished surgeon, whose work in the protection of wounds in some respects anticipated that of Lister; Chassaignac, to whose inventive genius surgery owes new means of preventing hemorrhage and purulent infection, and who introduced the great principle of surgical drainage; finally Maisonneuve, almost a contemporary, whose name is a household word to the surgeons of the present generation; without mentioning for the moment the subject of this sketch, Laennec, the greatest of them all. Six greater men never came from one province in the same limited space of time.