A clergyman's idea of a model physician : an address delivered at the commencement of the Albany Medical College, June 8, 1858 / by Duncan Kennedy.

  • Kennedy, Duncan, 1809-1887.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A clergyman's idea of a model physician : an address delivered at the commencement of the Albany Medical College, June 8, 1858 / by Duncan Kennedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    s it may come before you. It is yours to avert disease, or to seek its removal where it has already seized upon its vic- tim, to soften the pillow of the languishing, to mitigate the agonies of pain, and to inspire the desponding spirit with the cheering impulses of hope. When the destroying angel is breathing contagion upon the community, when the pesti- lence is walking in darkness, and the destruction is wasting at noon-day, it is yours to take your stand in its course, to interpose the potency of your profession, like the incense of Aaron, between the living and the dead, that the plague may be stayed. Human happiness, in its deepest relationships in this world, so far as dependent upon material circumstances, is, perhaps, more directly affected by your profession than by any other. Of what value are the richest gifts of Provi- dence to him who is incapacitated by disease to enjoy them 1 What though the landscape be diversified with scenes swelling into mountain grandeur and sweeping into ex- tended valleys and plains, and canopied with a firmament studded with suns and stars, when the organ of vision has become so impaired that it can not behold them ! What though field and forest be melodious with murmuring brooks and the singing of birds, when the ear is deaf to the har- mony of sounds ! What though the richest treasures of science and literature be opened to the mind, inviting its investigations and offering its most brilliant rewards, when that mind is the tenant of a deranged physical organism, able to bear no exertion, every nerve in which has become the medium of pain and depression, leaving the soul to de- sire supremely a deliverance from the body of this death ! Here it is the province of the physician to exert his power and bestow the blessings of his art; to remove the film from the blinded eye, to unstop the deaf ear, and to restore the disturbed harmonies of the physical constitution, that the mind ma}r exercise untrammeled its noblest energies. We may loose ourselves in admiration of the astronomer,