[7] Commencement Address at the Army Medical School, Washington, D. C., May 29, 1909.--From "_The Military Surgeon_," July, 1909. The experience of listening to a so-called Commencement Address under these peculiar circumstances is doubtless as novel to you as is to me its preparation. So different is this occasion from that usually spoken of as Commencement Day, that it taxed my judgment as much as it did my ability to--as it were--"meet the indication," and to try to say the appropriate thing. It behooves me to remember that this is in effect not an address to a class of students just entering a learned profession, but an effort on the part of one on the borderland of experiences gathered from a civil surgeon's work, yet enjoying a quasi military title, with strong ties and leanings--to some extent inherited--toward the course of the army surgeon and the fascinations of the soldier's life. Self-evident it is that you need no admonition which I could give, for the very fact of your presence here indicates that your selection by your superior officers stamps their approval of your ability as well as your character. Time has wrought vast changes in the personnel of the army medical corps, as in every other branch of the service. From the days of Xenophon, with his selection of the best material afforded, to the dark middle ages with practically no provision, then to the later centuries with their menial barbers and barber surgeons, and then the very gradually improved conditions which bettered the service, down to the present time, when the best is none too good, there has been that same evolution which has characterized all the rest of mankind's surroundings and man's realization of his public and private duties. From the days when the first duty of the so-called army surgeon was to minister to his commanding general, and when the private soldier received but the scantiest if any attention, we have arrived at that time when the good health of the entire army is the aim and pride of the medical corps, and when public opinion demands for every enlisted man a degree of watchful care greater than many parents bestow upon their own families. The line officer of to-day can no longer afford to disregard the advice of his medical officers, and camp sanitation is now of even greater importance than operative technique, because preventable sickness and the incapacity caused by disease are recognized as far more to be dreaded than the bullets of the enemy. Public estimate of our duties to the sick and wounded has varied largely during different epochs. Thus Homer makes Nestor say: "A surgeon skilled our wounds to heal, Is more than armies to the public weal." Homer also lauded the services of the two sons of Aesculapius, whom he deified as the grandest of heroes and the wisest of surgeons, and thus wrote of them at the siege of Troy, twelve hundred years before the birth of Christ: