Kitabı oku: «Education: How Old The New», sayfa 19

There is practically nothing in modern surgery that these men did not touch in their text-books. Perhaps the most surprising thing is to find that William of Salicet, in discussing his cases, suggested that sometimes he succeeded in obtaining union by first intention by keeping his wounds clean. Alas for the surgery of succeeding centuries, Guy de Chauliac, a greater mechanical genius than William, insisted that union by first intention was an illusion and that it could only come through pus formation. Laudable pus became the shibboleth of surgery for centuries, imposed upon it by the genius of a great man. Most men think that they think, they really follow leaders, and so we followed blindly after Guy until Lister came and showed us our mistake.

Guy was the professor of surgery down at Montpellier, and also the physician to the Popes, who for the time were at Avignon. His text-book of surgery is full of expressions that reveal the man and the teacher. He said the surgeon who cuts the human body without a knowledge of anatomy is like a blind carpenter carving wood. He insisted that men should make observations for themselves and not blindly follow others. He discussed operations on the head, the thorax and the abdomen. He said that wounds of the intestines would surely be fatal unless sewed up, and he described the technique of suture for them. His specialty was operation for hernia. There are pictures still extant of operations for hernia done about this time in an exaggerated Trendelenberg position. The patient is fastened to a board by the legs, head down, the board at an angle of forty-five degrees against the wall. The intestines dropped back from the site of operation and allowed the surgeon to proceed without danger. Guy said that more patients were operated on for the sake of the doctor's pocket in hernia cases than for their own benefit. His instructions to his students, his high standard of professional advice, all show us one of the great physicians of all time and historians of medicine are unanimous in their praise of him.

The next great development in medicine came at the time of the Renaissance with the reorganization of the universities. In the sixteenth century Italy particularly did magnificent work in the universities, stimulated by close touch with old Greek medicine. At Padua, at Bologna, above all, at Rome, the great foundations of the modern medical sciences were laid. I need only mention the names of Vesalius, Varolius, Eustachius, Fallopius, Columbus (who discovered the circulation of the blood in the lungs), Caesalpinus, to whom and rightly the Italians attribute the discovery of the systemic circulation nearly half a century before Harvey. These men all of them did fine work, everywhere in Italy. They were doing original investigation of the greatest value. Whenever anybody anywhere in Europe at this time wanted to do good work in science of any kind,–astronomy, mathematics, physics and, above all, in any of the medical sciences,–he went down to Italy; Italy was and continued for five centuries after the thirteenth to be what France was for a scant half a century in the nineteenth, and Germany for a corresponding period just before our own time. How curiously the history of science and of medicine was written when it seems to contradict this.

Above all, what ridiculous nonsense has been talked about Papal opposition to science. The great universities of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had charters from the Popes. They were immediately under ecclesiastical influence, yet they did fine work in anatomy and surgery. The Father of Modern Surgery was a Papal physician. The Papal physicians for seven centuries have been the greatest contributors to medicine. The Popes deliberately selected as their physicians the greatest investigators of the time. Besides Guy de Chauliac such men as Eustachius, Varolius, Columbus, Caesalpinus, Lancisi, Malpighi were Papal physicians. We have even a more striking testimony to the Papal patronage and encouragement of medicine and to the Church's fostering care of medical education, here in America. The first university medical school in America was not, as has so often been said, the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania founded in 1767, but the medical school of the University of Mexico, where medical lectures were first delivered in 1578. Our medical schools in this country have only become genuine university medical schools in the sense of being organic portions of the university in the last twenty-five years. Before that their courses were brief and unworthy and no preliminary education was required.

The universities of Spanish America from the very beginning required three years of preliminary training in the university before medicine could be taken up, and then four years of medical studies. These four years became five and six years in certain countries, and at no time during the nineteenth century did the medical education of Spanish America sink to the low level unfortunately reached in the United States. The lesson of it is clear. When medical education is seriously undertaken as a university department, all is well. When it is not, the results are disastrous.

In our day and country another great awakening of university life has come and with it a drawing together in intimate union of universities and their graduate departments. Above all, the medical schools have profited by this closer connection with university work, and the prospects for medical education in the United States and a new period of wonderful progress in it are very bright. You have my hearty congratulations, then, on your graduation from a great university medical school here in the West, and I hope sincerely that you shall prove worthy of Alma Mater. You have had the privileges of university education and these involve duties. This is ever true, though unfortunately it is somewhat seldom realized. Noblesse oblige. We hear much in these days of the stewardship of wealth, and do not let us forget that there is a stewardship of talent and education. Much more will be demanded of you because of your opportunities, and we look for an accomplishment on your part far above the ordinary in medical work and maintenance and uplift of professional dignity, that shall mean much for your fellows.

Remember that you are doing only half your duty if you but make your living or even make money. You are bound besides to make medicine. For all that the forefathers have done for us we in this generation must make return by a broadening of their medical views for the benefit of posterity. If you were graduates of some fourth-rate proprietary medical school, perhaps it would be sufficient if you succeeded in making your living out of your profession. Perhaps even your teachers would then be quite satisfied with you. No such meagre accomplishment can possibly satisfy those who are sending you out to-day. Above all, you must remember that your education is not for yourself, but for the benefit of others as well. If, somehow, its influence becomes narrowed so as only to affect yourself and your intimate friends then it is essentially a failure. You must not only live your lives for yourselves, but so that at the end of them the community shall have been benefited and medicine and its beneficent mission to mankind shall be broader and more significant because you have lived. With this message, then, I welcome you as brother physicians and bid you God-speed in your professional work.

THE COLLEGE MAN IN LIFE

"Non scholae sed vitae discimus."

–-Seneca, Epist., 106.

[We learn for life not for school.]

"Nec si non obstatur, propterea etiam permittitur."

–-Cicero, Philip., xiii, 6.

[And because a thing is not forbidden that does not make it permissible.]

"Ubicunque homo est ibi beneficio locus est."

–-Seneca, De Vita Beata, 24.

[Wherever man is there is room to do good.]

"Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. At present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may sometimes be very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of education in this sense of the word, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only training, which upon our view would be characterized as education; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. But let us not quarrel with one another about the name, provided that the proposition which has just been granted hold good: to wit, that those who are rightly educated generally become good men. Neither must we cast a slight upon education, which is the first and fairest thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, though liable to take a wrong direction, is capable of reformation. And this work of reformation is the great business of every man while he lives."

–-Plato, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.

THE COLLEGE MAN IN LIFE ²⁶

Gentlemen of the Graduating Class: The custom is, I fear, for the orator who addresses the graduating class to talk over the heads of those who have received their degree to the larger audience who are assembled for the academic function. Now, that I do not propose to do. What I have to say is to you. My message is meant entirely for you. Since your friends are present I have to raise my voice so that they shall hear what I have to say, but I consider that they are here only on sufferance and that I am here to say whatever I can that may mean something for you in the careers that are opening up to you. Now, I am not of those who think that the main purpose of the eld is to give advice to the young. Man is so fashioned that he wants to get his own experience for himself. It is true that "only fools learn by their own experience," wise men learn by that of others. But then we have divine warrant for saying that there used to be a goodly proportion of fools in the world and human experience agrees in our own time that not all the fools are dead yet. Our advice may not be taken in all its literalness; that would be too much to expect, but it has become an academic custom to give it, in the hope that it will be a landmark, perhaps an incentive, it may be a warning, surely some time a precious memory in the time to come. Few men who ever lived were less likely to think that their advice might mean very much than dear old Bobbie Burns, to whom one of your number referred, and yet some time I hope that in some serious mood you'll read and think well on the poetic epistle of advice to his youthful friend. There are some lines at the beginning of it that have haunted me at times these many years when I have been asked to address studious youth at the commencement, as our term for the occasion so well declares, of their real education in the post-graduate courses of that University of Hard Knocks which valedictorians at this season of the year are so prone to call the cold, cold world. The Scottish ploughman bard said in the choice English he could so well assume on occasion:

 
  "I long hae tho't, my youthful friend,
     A something to hae sent you.
   Though it may serve no ither end
     Than as a kind memento;
   But how the subject theme may gang.
     Let time and chance determine;
   Perhaps it may turn out a sang
     Perhaps turn out a sermon."
 

One thing is sure, whatever I shall say to you shall not be a song, though, alas! addresses of advice are prone to sound like sermons. Yet the sermon, after all, in the old Latin word sermo is only a discourse, and I am going to make mine as brief as possible. It shall, I hope, serve to round out some of the things that you yourselves have been saying with regard to Catholics and social works and, above all. Catholic college men in social works.

We are rightly getting to estimate the value of a man in our time in terms of what he accomplishes for others much more than for himself. Almost any one who devotes himself with sufficient exclusiveness to the business of helping himself will make a success of it, though some may doubt of the value of that success. What is difficult above all in our time, when the spirit of individualism is so rampant, is to make a success of helpfulness for others while making life flow on with reasonable smoothness for one's self. I do not hope to be able to impart to you the precious secret of how surely to do this, but something that I may say may be helpful to you in leading a larger than a mere selfish life, so that when the end shall come, as come it must, though one would never suspect it from the ways of men, the world will be a little better at least because you have lived.

Education has become the fetish of the day and the shibboleth by which the Philistine is recognized from the chosen people of culture and refinement. Popular education has become the watchword of the time, and all things are fondly hoped for and confidently promised in its name. We are somewhat in doubt as to the mode of education that will be surely effective for all good and we are not quite certain as to how the results are exactly to be obtained, but education is to make the world better; to get rid gradually, yet inevitably, of the evil that is in it; to lift men up to the higher plane of knowledge where selfishness is at least not supposed to exist, or surely to be greatly minimized, where crime, of course, shall disappear, and where even the minor evils so hide their diminished heads that the millennium can not be far distant. It is true that some of these glorious promises seem long in fulfilment to those who are a little sceptical of the influence of particular forms of education that are now popular, but, of course, the response to that is, that so far we have not had the time to have the full benefit of education exert itself.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Encyclopedists in France, in their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the distinction between education for power and education for information, confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course, would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils, vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course, unhappiness would disappear from the world. That is considerably over a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. Indeed, there are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically demanded even than at the time of the Encyclopedists. As for unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a decent living wage, that it is quite startling. Our insane asylums are growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the inmates are there because of immorality. Suicide is on the increase faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is noted in the younger years. It is between fifteen and twenty-five that suicides are multiplying.

Of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to have its full beneficial effects. Our common school education is not enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great civilizing factor for the development of mankind. Educators would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this. If we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of college and university training to the majority of the people, then say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual development by the diffusion of information can and must give.

It is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it to present-day conditions as we know them. After all we have been turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the higher education from our colleges and universities during the last generation or so. They have gone out by the thousand to influence their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the world how much education means for the happiness of all. There is a slang expression familiar in New York just now that you in New England may not know, for I understand that even the owls near Boston do not say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here: "Some men are born good, some make good and some are caught with the goods on them." Not all of the graduates of colleges and universities were born good, of course. I wonder what we shall find with regard to the other two phases of existence. There are not a few who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made good, too many have been caught with the goods on them.

Let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption. Of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are both corruptors and corrupted. It is, of course, just as confidently to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. Alas! for human nature, it is just the contrary. The leaders in big corruption, the mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have nearly all been college men. This has been true in California, in Missouri, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in Illinois. It would be easy to add other states, but I am only mentioning those where investigations are not yet forgotten, though we American people have cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. The states are sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically universal. In recent years we have been getting closer to the man higher up. In a great many of the cases, I should say in a majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not, then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of evil. The boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks, who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps even in the majority of cases, been college men. Certainly college graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven the whole mass for righteousness.

In the even more dangerous evils of our time that have risked the very existence of democratic government, in the imposition on the people by the privileged classes of indirect taxes and tariffs that make life hard for the poor, but add largely to the wealth of the rich, college men have only too often been the active agents. Without their active co-operation certainly these crying injustices to the poor would never have been accomplished. They have often been adding useless millions to useless millions simply for the game; not caring how much the poor had to suffer. They have been accumulating at the expense of the working classes what Governor Hughes of New York so well called, not long since, a corruption fund for their children. They have been the prime factors in many agencies for evil and they have not been the guardians of the rights of others, the weaker ones, that we have a right to expect of them. In the awful evils that have been exposed as a consequence of the fellow-servant doctrine and the contributory negligence principle at law, which have been the root of so much suffering in the world, college men have not helped to point out evils and organized for the solution of them, though they have been closely in contact with all the problems of them as judges, lawyers, directors of railroad companies, and industrial concerns. In general, while they have been in a position to know and alleviate some of the worst ills of our social system, they have done very little. They helped to bind fetters. It is men of much lower social station and education who have awakened us.

The investigations of recent years as to the condition of wage-earners have shown us many unfortunate evils. It was known that one in four of the population in London was living in dire poverty and this was thought to be due to the special circumstances in London. An investigation of York in England showed, however, that smaller towns, even cathedral towns, that were supposed to be almost without poverty, were hot-beds of it and were nearly as bad as London. Then, we took the flattering unction to our souls that these were altogether foreign conditions. Such investigations as we could make in New York, however, showed that we were little if any better than the reports from England and Germany revealed abroad. Then it was said that the large city, that brood-oven of vice and misery, was responsible. Pittsburg, for instance, set up the claim that while great fortunes were made there the workmen were paid better wages than any place else in the world. Alas for the fallibility of human judgment in social affairs! The Pittsburg Survey was made and it was found that while a few of the better-class workmen were paid very well, the great mass of the workmen were awfully underpaid, and it was impossible for the majority of them to live decently on what they received. Further investigations into industrial conditions have only emphasized the conclusions obtained from the Survey.

Human life has become very cheap in this country. A prominent clergyman said not very long ago that it was safer to be a murderer in the United States than a brakeman. The expression is true if the proportion of brakemen who lose their lives to murderers who lose theirs in this country is taken. We are careless of the lives of the honest workman, and sentimentally over-careful of the lives and comfort of the criminal. Every now and then there are inevitable reactions against this laxity of the law, and as a consequence, while Canada has no lynchings and there are none in England, while peoples of our stock have no need to appeal to force, we lynch many more than we execute in this country. The leaders of many of the mobs, as the directors of the industrial companies who knowingly allow the waste of life to go on, have had the benefit of our American education, such as it is. Educated people are responsible for things that are and unless they meet their responsibilities there will be no improvement.

Some of these abuses have risen to a climax. Not long ago a story was told that illustrates, as it seems to me, some present-day feelings very well. A great steel company having a contract for a bridge in the Far East, was rushing the last steel beams for the completion of the contract. America is noted for its marvellous power to do work rapidly that other countries take time for. There was a heavy penalty attached if they did not complete the contract on time. A fast steamer was waiting in New York harbor all ready to take this last consignment out with it. A special train was standing in the yards of the steel plant, to be rushed to New York just as soon as the beams were completed. In the midst of all the hurry and bustle a workman got his foot caught in the huge crane which transports the immense beams from one portion of the plant to the other. An examination of the manner in which he was caught showed clearly that he could not be released without taking the crane apart. That would mean that thirty-six hours would have to be spent in the mechanical handling of that crane. If that were done it would be quite impossible to make the shipment on time, so closely was the period of completion calculated. Not only was there a heavy money penalty, but there would be a decided loss of American prestige.

The workman who was caught was only a foreigner. He was only getting $1.25 a day. Just one thing was to be done evidently, because that steamer had to sail on time and that freight train had to get out the next morning. The other foreign workmen were put out of the shops, only the confidential men were left, an ambulance was summoned; as it appeared in sight the crane was run over the portion of the foot that was caught, the man was removed to the care of the surgeon, his wound was dressed at the hospital, the contract was completed on time and American enterprise and power to do things faster than all the world was vindicated.

We are making money. In the meantime the directors of companies under whom such things are done are mainly college men. Whether they feel it or not they are personally responsible for everything that happens in their business, for it is their business by which human life is sacrificed or human suffering increased, or human morality deteriorated. Probably the majority of the stockholders in the companies are college men. Some of them are college women. They are deriving incomes from forms of injustice, from conditions that cause human suffering that might be avoided. They are, whether they know it or not, committing one of the crimes that calls to heaven for vengeance–defrauding laborers of their wages; because to pay a man less than a decent living wage is to defraud that laborer of his wages. No man has a right to go into the labor market and buy labor as cheaply as he can. Men must live, they must support their families, and to compel them to take less than a decent living wage is to hold them in slavery. Every man who derives an income from such sources must know whether there is injustice at work or not in whatever he benefits by. It is easy to plead ignorance, but the ignorance is no justification. When we take money from something we must know that that money has no taint of injustice about it. There is a startling passage in the Scriptures that I have often thought should be repeated more frequently in our time. It is, "From the sins we know not of, O Lord deliver us."

There are many things that are done for the educated rich in our time, things that are full of injustice, yet from which the rich derive great benefits for which they will be held responsible. I cannot see it else. We hear much in our time of the stewardship of wealth, of the fact that if a man has much more money than others he is bound thereby to do more good with it, just inasmuch as he has superfluous means must he accomplish not only actually more but proportionately more than those who are less wealthy around him. What is true thus of material wealth is even truer of intellectual wealth. The man who has more education than his neighbors is bound thereby to be helpful to his neighbors, to uplift them–how much one hesitates to use that much-abused word,–to help solve their problems, to make life happier for them; he is bound to use his faculties, God-given as they are and developed by intellectual opportunities, not for himself alone, but for all those around him.

Unfortunately recent generations of college men have not taken this responsibility seriously, or have not seen the duty that lay before them and the burden imposed on them by the very necessity of conditions. As a consequence they have often been leaders in evil. They have almost invariably been protagonists of selfishness and of individualism. So long as they have gotten much out of life they have not cared whether others have had the paths for even reasonable happiness and some opportunities in life made smooth. Only too often they have been a stumbling block in the road for others less educated than they. They have been the men higher up, the bribers who are ever so much worse than the bribed, the company directors who have turned aside and seen evil and injustice and pretended in smug propriety that it was no affair of theirs, or perhaps have said in self-justification–and such self-justification!–that if they did not do it others would; the wealthy men who have used every means to get around the law to oppress the poor, to add useless wealth to useless wealth at the cost of others, even at the risk of subverting liberty, overturning government and ruining this latest experiment in democracy. I am not a muckraker, but we cannot hide from ourselves and we must not miss the real meaning of the events in the life around us as it really is.

When I think of the situation I am prone to compare with it other generations of college men and what they accomplished. History is not worth while if it tells us only of the past. It is of no more value than any other story, real or fictitious. History is significant only when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. We are prone to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations. Let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us to consider to-day.