Each generation has its own problems to face,
looks at truth from a special focus and does not see quite the same
outlines as any other. For example, men of the present generation
grow up under influences very different from those which surrounded my
generation in the seventies of the last century, when Virchow and
his great contemporaries laid the sure and deep foundations of modern
pathology. Which of you now knows the "Cellular Pathology" as we did? To
many of you it is a closed book,--to many more Virchow may be thought a
spent force. But no, he has only taken his place in a great galaxy. We
do not forget the magnitude of his labors, but a new generation has new
problems--his message was not for you--but that medicine today runs in
larger moulds and turns out finer castings is due to his life and work.
It is one of the values of lectures on the history of medicine to
keep alive the good influences of great men even after their positive
teaching is antiquated. Let no man be so foolish as to think that he has
exhausted any subject for his generation. Virchow was not happy when he
saw the young men pour into the old bottle of cellular pathology the new
wine of bacteriology. Lister could never understand how aseptic surgery
arose out of his work.
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