Part 3

At the close of the address the vote of thanks was moved by Sir Herbert Warren, the President of Magdalen College, who described Osler as the modern Galen, and was seconded by Sir John Barran, the member of Parliament from Leeds, in felicitous words of discriminating praise of the President's address. The audience responded most enthusiastically.

I shall never forget the hour which I spent with Osler just before the address, in inspecting the wonderful collection of scientific instruments of historical interest which Mr. Gunther had assembled at Osler's request from the various colleges at Oxford, especially from Merton, the old home of science. An interesting descriptive catalogue of the collection had been prepared. With what delight Osler showed me and told me the histories and associations of the astrolabes, armillary spheres, orreries, telescopes, lenses, microscopes, books, etc., which he had caused to be gathered together in connection with the meeting of the Classical Association! You will recognize a characteristic touch and thought of Osler in arranging for such an original exhibit to interest a meeting of scholars.

When not long after the address I said good-bye to Osler I little thought that it was to be our final parting, but I rejoice to have been with him then and to remember him as I saw him last on that triumphal day.

Thus, though from first to last his heart was wrapped up in his profession and its science, his mind was open to other things, and his confession that the Religio Medici was the second book he ever purchased and that the particular copy had always remained at his bedside is not without significance. He lived to prove himself, not only a worthy disciple of those scholars of the Renascence who interested themselves in natural philosophy, but also of those who were devotees of the ancient languages and literature. But Sir William Osler was a man first--a physician and scholar afterward; and beneath his high spirits, his love of fun, lay an infinite compassion and tenderness toward his humankind. "Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." And upon few men has such a measure of admiration, affection, and love been bestowed in return. These things he bore without pride, as he bore his great success in life with humility.

On July 12, 1919, less than two months after the address was delivered, he attained his seventieth year, and was presented with two volumes containing sixty-seven original "Contributions to Medical and Biological Research" written in his honour. In addition to this, tributes were showered upon him from all sides, and his work, character, and accomplishments became the subject of papers innumerable. It was an extraordinary outburst, one of those exceptional occurrences when people do not wait for the passing--in this case so near at hand--to say, what is in their hearts to say, of the life of a friend. A brief characterization of him from one of the most eminent of British scholars was quoted early in this note, and it may be fitting to close with some lines by the dean of American classical scholars, Basil L. Gildersleeve, written for what proved to be his last birthday:

ON A PORTRAIT OF SIR WILLIAM OSLER, BART.

William the Fowler, Guillaume l'Oiseleur! I love to call him thus, and when I scan The counterfeit presentment of the man, I feel his net, I hear his arrows whir. Make at the homely surname no demur, Nor on a nomination lay a ban With which a line of sovran lords began, Henry the Fowler was first Emperor. Asclepius was Apollo's chosen son, But to that son he never lent his bow, Nor did Hephæstus teach to forge his net; Both secrets hath Imperial Osler won. His winged words straight to their quarry go. All hearts are holden by his meshes yet. HARVEY CUSHING

Brookline February 18, 1920

THE OLD HUMANITIES AND THE NEW SCIENCE

THE OLD HUMANITIES AND THE NEW SCIENCE

Early in the sixteenth century a literary joke sent inextinguishable laughter through the learned circles of Europe. The Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum is great literature, to which I refer for two reasons--its standard is an exact gauge of my scholarship, and had Magister Nostrandus Ortuinus Gratius of Cologne, to whom most of the letters are addressed, been asked to join that wicked Erfurt Circle, he could not have been more surprised than I was to receive a gracious invitation to preside over this gathering of British scholars. I felt to have been sailing under false colours to have ever, by pen or tongue, suggested the possession of even the traditional small Latin and less Greek. Relieved by the assurance that in alternate years the qualification of your President was an interest in education and literature, I gladly accepted, not, however, without such anticipatory qualms as afflict an amateur at the thought of addressing a body of experts. Not an educated man in the Oxford sense, yet faint memories of the classics linger--the result of ten years of such study as lads of my generation pursued, memories best expressed in Tom Hood's lines:

"The weary tasks I used to con! The hopeless leaves I wept upon! Most fruitless leaves to me!"

In a life of teaching and practice, a mere picker-up of learning's crumbs is made to realize the value of the humanities in science not less than in general culture.

To have a Professor of Medicine in this Chair gives to the Oxford meeting an appropriate renaissance--shall we say mediæval?--flavour, and one may be pardoned the regret that the meeting is not being held in May, 1519, to have had the pleasure of listening to an address from a real Oxford scholar-physician, an early teacher of Greek in this University, and the founder of the Royal College of Physicians, whose Rudimenta Grammatices and De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis upheld for a generation, on the Continent at least, the reputation of English scholarship. These noble walls, themselves an audience--indeed, most appreciative of audiences--have storied memories of Linacre's voice, and the basis of the keen judgment of Erasmus may have been formed by intercourse with him in this very school. In those happy days, to know Hippocrates and Galen was to know disease and to be qualified to practise; and my profession looks back in grateful admiration to such great medical humanists as Linacre and Caius and Rabelais. Nor can I claim to speak for pure science, some salt of which remains from early association, and from a lifelong attempt to correlate with art a science which makes medicine, I was going to say the only--but it is more civil to say the most--progressive of the learned professions.

To have lived right through an epoch, matched only by two in the story of the race, to have shared in its long struggle, to have witnessed its final victory (and in my own case, to be left I trust with wit enough to realize its significance)--to have done this has been a wonderful privilege. To have outgrown age-old theories of man and of nature, to have seen west separated from east in the tangled skein of human thought, to have lived in a world re-making--these are among the thrills and triumphs of the Victorian of my generation. To a childhood and youth came echoes of the controversy that Aristarchus began, Copernicus continued, and Darwin ended, that put the microcosm into line with the macrocosm, and for the golden age of Eden substituted the tellus dura of Lucretius. Think of the Cimmerian darkness out of which our generation has, at any rate, blazed a path! Picture the mental state of a community which could produce "Omphalos: An Attempt to untie the Geological Knot"! I heard warm clerical discussions on its main thesis, that the fossils were put into the earth's strata to test men's faith in the Mosaic account of the creation, and our Professor of Natural Theology lectured seriously upon it! The intellectual unrest of those days wrapped many in that "dyvine cloude of unknowynge," by which happy phrase Brother Herp designates mediæval mysticism; and not a bad thing for a young man to live through, as sufficient infection usually remains to enable him to understand, if not to sympathize with, mental states alien or even hostile.

By the distinguished naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.

An Age of Force followed the final subjugation of Nature. The dynamo replaced the steam-engine, radiant energy revealed the hidden secrets of matter, to the conquest of the earth was added the control of the air and the mastery of the deep. Nor was it only an Age of Force. Never before had man done so much for his brother, the victory over the powers of Nature meant also glorious victories of peace; pestilences were checked, the cry of the poor became articulate, and to help the life of the submerged half became a sacred duty of the other. How full we were of the pride of life! In 1910 at Edinburgh I ended an address on "Man's Redemption of Man" with the well-known lines of Shelley beginning, "Happiness and Science dawn though late upon the earth." And now, having survived the greatest war in history, and a great victory, with the wreckage of mediæval autonomy to clear up, our fears are lest we may fail to control the fretful forces of Caliban, and our hopes are to rebuild Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.

Never before in its long evolution has the race realized its full capacity. Our fathers have told us, and we ourselves have known, of glorious sacrifices; but the past four years have exhausted in every direction the possibilities of human effort. And, as usual, among the nations the chief burden has fallen on that weary Titan, the Motherland,

"Bearing on shoulders immense, Atlantean, the load Well-nigh not to be borne Of the too vast orb of her fate."

Not alone did she furnish the sinews of war, but she developed a spirit that made defeat impossible.

No wonder war has advocates, to plead the heroic clash of ideals, the purging of a nation's dross in the fire of suffering and sacrifice, and the welding in one great purpose of a scattered people. Even Montaigne, sanest of men, called it "the greatest and most magnificent of human actions"; and the glamours of its pride, pomp, and circumstance still captivate. But there are other sides which we should face without shrinking. Why dwell on the horrors such as we doctors and nurses have had to see? Enough to say that war blasts the soul, and in this great conflict the finer sense of humanity has been shocked to paralysis by the helplessness of our civilization and the futility of our religion to stem a wave of primitive barbarism. Black as are the written and unwritten pages of history, the concentrated and prolonged martyrdom surpasses anything man has yet had to endure. What a shock to the proud and mealy-mouthed Victorian who had begun to trust that Love was creation's final law, forgetting that Egypt and Babylon are our contemporaries and of yesterday in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of years since the cave-dwellers left their records on walls and bones. In the mystic shadow of the Golden Bough, and swayed by the emotions of our savage ancestors, we stand aghast at the revelation of the depth and ferocity of primal passions which reveal the unchangeableness of human nature.

When the wild beast of Plato's dream becomes a waking reality, and a herd-emotion of hate sweeps a nation off its feet, the desolation that follows is wider than that in France and Belgium, wider even than the desolation of grief, and something worse--the hardened heart, the lie in the soul--so graphically described in Book II of the "Republic"--that forces us to do accursed things, and even to defend them! I refer to it because, as professors, we have been accused of sinning against the light. Of course we have. Over us, too, the wave swept, but I protest against the selection of us for special blame. The other day, in an address on "The Comradeship of Letters" at Turin, President Wilson is reported to have said: "It is one of the great griefs of this war that the universities of the Central Empires used the thoughts of science to destroy mankind; it is the duty of the universities of these states to redeem science from this disgrace and to show that the pulse of humanity beats in the classroom, and that there are sought out not the secrets of death but the secrets of life." A pious and worthy wish! But once in war a nation mobilizes every energy, and to say that science has been prostituted in discovering means of butchery is to misunderstand the situation. Slaughter, wholesale and unrestricted, is what is sought, and to accomplish this the discoveries of the sainted Faraday and of the gentle Dalton are utilized to the full, and to their several nations scientific men render this service freely, if not gladly. That the mental attitude engendered by science is apt to lead to a gross materialism is a vulgar error. Scientific men, in mufti or in uniform, are not more brutal than their fellows, and the utilization of their discoveries in warfare should not be a greater reproach to them than is our joyous acceptance of their success.

What a change of heart after the appalling experience of the first gassing in 1915! Nothing more piteously horrible than the sufferings of the victims has ever been seen in warfare. Surely we could not sink to such barbarity! Is thy servant a dog? But martial expediency soon compelled the Allies to enlist the resources of chemistry; the instruction of our enemies was soon bettered, and before the Armistice there were developments in technique and destructive force that would have delighted Nisroch, who first invented aerial "machinations to plague the sons of men." A group of medical men representing the chief universities and medical bodies of the United Kingdom was innocent enough to suggest that such an unclean weapon--the use of lethal gases, "condemning its victims to death by long-drawn-out torture," and with infinite possibilities for its further development--should be forever abolished. "Steeped in folly by theories and prepossessions," failure to read the "lessons of war which should have sufficed to convince a beetle"--such were among the newspaper comments; and in other ways we were given to understand that our interference in such matters was most untimely. All the same, it is gratifying to see that the suggestion has been adopted at the Peace Congress.

I am sorry to have seen Sargent's picture "Gassed" in this year's Academy. It haunts the mind like a nightmare.

With what a howl of righteous indignation the slaughter of our innocent women and children by the bombing of open towns was received! It was a dirty and bloody business, worthy of the Oxydracians by means of Levin-bolts and Thunders and more horrible, more frightful, more diabolical, maiming, breaking, tearing, and slaying more folk and confounding men's senses and throwing down more walls than would a hundred thunderbolts.

Rabelais, Book IV, ch. LXI.

Against reprisals there was at first a strong feeling. Early in 1916 I wrote to the "Times": "The cry for reprisals illustrates the exquisitely hellish state of mind into which war plunges even sensible men. Not a pacifist, but a 'last-ditcher,' yet I refuse to believe that as a nation, how bitter soever the provocation, we shall stain our hands in the blood of the innocent. In this matter let us be free from bloodguiltiness, and let not the undying reproach of humanity rest on us as on the Germans." Two years changed me into an ordinary barbarian. A detailed tally of civilians killed by our airmen has not, I believe, been published, but the total figures quoted are not far behind the German.

Could a poll have been taken a week before the Armistice as to the moral justification of the bombing of Berlin--for which we were ready--how we should have howled at the proposer of any doubt! And many Jonahs were displeased that a city greater than Nineveh, with more than the threescore and ten thousand who knew not the right hand from the left, had been spared. We may deplore the necessity and lament, as did a certain great personage: