that if they must go into actual contact with these patients they should first repeat the Twenty-second Psalm. You may find in the old books, if you will hunt for them, curious pictures illustrating the precautions taken a few hundred years ago against the pestilence, of whose nature they knew nothing, and seeing them you may imagine the vague dread and even the abject fear which led the _physici puri_ or physicians to send the barbers in to minister to plague-stricken patients, while they contented themselves with ministering at long range to their needs. But gentlemen, I fear lest I weary you with a longer rehearsal of mediæval customs and student follies. While they have all passed away some of them have survived either in tradition or in modified form, as will surely have occurred to you while they were rehearsed. You will not fail to note the steady progress of an ethical evolution which has toned down the barbarities and the asperities of the past, and which has substituted a far more ennobling life-purpose and method of its accomplishment than seemed to actuate your predecessors of long ago. It is small wonder that the students of those days bore an ill-repute with their surrounding neighbors. You may see better now, perhaps, why the medical student even of to-day has to contend with a prejudice against both his calling and himself, a prejudice begotten of the many debaucheries and misdeeds of his predecessors, and, I am sorry to say, even certain excesses of to-day. I do not know how I may more fittingly terminate these remarks than by reminding you that the profession which you students hope to enter has suffered most seriously in time past from the character of the men who have entered it, and that even to-day certain of its members fail to have a proper regard for its dignity. It is axiomatic that those slights and indignities from which we often suffer, and the neglect and indifference of which we often complain, are in effect the result of our own shortcomings, and that we are ourselves largely to blame because of that which does not suit us. I beg you then to remember that even at the outset of student life there should be ever before you such an ideal of intellectual force and dignity, of power, of co-ordination of mind and body, as may keep you ever in the right way, so that when you at last attain your goal you may deserve that sort of benediction which I find in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays (_Custom of the Country_, v. iv.): "So may you ever Be styled the 'Hands of Heaven,' Nature's restorers; Get wealth and honors, and, by your success In all your undertakings, propagate A great opinion in the world." IX A STUDY OF MEDICAL WORDS, DEEDS AND MEN[6] [6] Address in Medicine, delivered June 24, 1902, at Yale University Commencement. [Reprinted from the _Yale Medical Journal_, July, 1902.] _Study nature for facts; study lives of great men for inspiration how to use them_