National Republican (Washington City

To the Doctors.

Brooklyn, Mar. 9.—The Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D. D., pastor of the Tabernacle, made the address this evening at the Long Island College Hospital commencement. A vast audience was present at the meeting, which was held in the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

It is no strange thing that one of my profession should be invited to address gentlemen of your profession. Our callings intertwine and are in full sympathy. Shall we not meet on congratulatory occasions like this when so often we meet in the homes of distress? We shake hands across the cradle of anguish; infants. We join each other in an attempt at solace where the paroxysms of grief demand an anodyne as well as a prayer. We look into each other's faces through the dusk as the night of death is falling in the sick room. I bless the doctors all the world over, and let all the domestic circles say, Amen.

You, doctor, are our first and last earthly friend: you stand at the gates of life when we enter this world and you stand at the gates of death when we go out of it. In the closing moments of our earthly existence, when the hand of wife or mother or sister or daughter shall hold our right hand, it will give strength to our dying moments if we can feel the tip of your fingers along the pulse of the left wrist. No other calling in the world, one excepted, has received so great honor as yours. The poet wrote:

'A wise physician, skilled our wounds to heal,
Is more than armies to the public weal.

Cicero said: 'There is nothing in which men approach the gods as when they try to give health to other men.'

The battle fields of the American Revolution welcomed Doctors Mercer, and Warren, and Rush. When the French army was demoralized at fear of a plague, the leading surgeon of that army inoculated himself with the plague to show the soldiers there was no contagion in it, and their courage rose. All honor and advancement for so great a profession, from the day when Hippocrates tried to cure the great Pericles with hellebore and flaxseed poultices, down to far later centuries, when Haller announced the theory of respiration, and Harvey the circulation of the blood, and Aselli the uses of the lymphatic vessels, and Jenner balked the worst disease that ever scourged Europe, and Sydenham developed the recuperative forces of the body, and cinchona bark stopped the shivering agues of the world, and Sir Astley Cooper, and Abernethy, and Hosack, and Romeyn, and the generation just passed fought back disease with their lancets and scalpels, and still later to discoveries made by some who sit before me to-night.

If we who are laymen in medicine would understand what the medical profession has accomplished for the insane we must look into the dungeon where the poor creatures used to be incarcerated. Madmen chained naked to the wall, a kennel of rotten straw their only sleeping place, room unventilated and unlighted, the worst calamity of the race punished with the very worst punishment. Then come and look at the insane asylums of Dix and Kirkbride, so fed and pictured and librarianed and concerted, until all the art and adornments come to coax reason back to her throne.

See what the great hero of vaccination accomplished. The ministers of the gospel denounced this use of the cow pox. Small wits caricatured its author as riding in a great procession on the back of a cow, and grave men expressed it as their opinion that all the diseases of the brute creation would be transferred into the human family, and they gave instances where, they said, actually horns had come out on the foreheads of innocent persons and people had begun to chew the cud. But the hero of science went on fighting for vaccination until it has been estimated that the doctors in fifty years have saved more lives than all the battles of any one century destroyed.

Passing along the streets of Edinburgh a few weeks after the death of Sir James Y. Simpson, I saw the photograph of the doctor in the windows of the shops and stores, and well might that photograph be put in every window in honor of the man who first used chloroform as an anaesthetic agent. In other days they tried to dull human pain by the hasheesh of the Arabs and the mandragora of the Roman and Greek. But it was left to Dr. James Y. Simpson to introduce this great mercy of the ages. Alas for the writhing subjects of surgery in other centuries! Blessed be God for that wet sponge or vial in the hands of the operating surgeon in the clinical department of the medical college, or in the sick room of the domestic circle, or on the battle field amid hundreds of amputations! Napoleon, after the battle, rode along the line and saw under a tree standing in the snow Larrey, the surgeon, operating upon the wounded. Napoleon passed on, and twenty-five hours afterward came along the same place and saw the same surgeon operating in the same place, and he had not left it. Alas for the battle fields without chloroform!

But now the soldier boy takes a few breaths from the sponge, forgets all the pang of the gunshot fracture, and while the doctors are standing around him he lies there dreaming of home and mother and heaven. No more parents standing around the suffering child struggling to get away from the sharp instrument, but slumber instead of excruciation, and the child wakes up and says, 'Father, what was that horse to-day for?'

Oh, blessed be God for James Y. Simpson and the heaven-descended mercies of chloroform.

We thank you doctors for the fact that your profession has revealed the wonders of the human body. We had read in an old classic that we were fearfully and wonderfully made, but you take us into your lecture and operating rooms and show us how it was. The world knew nothing about the human eye except that it was blue, or black, or hazel, and tried to have it as pretty as possible, until your profession showed us it had two distinct sovereignties—that if we wept the tear gathered in one chamber, and if we saw an object the image fell in another chamber. You showed us that it was a compilation of microscope and telescope in the same instrument, so delicate, so instantaneous, and so infallible, that a mile away something hurled up, a mile away and striking an instrument which has not the agitation of even winking under the power of the stroke. The ear was as much a mystery except by those who had been deaf, until your profession showed us it was an autograph contrivance that by the estimate of an oculist can catch the sound of 1,500 vibrations in a second; and you showed us that it was the headquarters to which there came quick dispatches, part the way by cartilage, part the way by air, part the way by bone, the lowest descending into the ear at the speed of one thousand and ninety feet a second; a miniature instrument of music having only a quarter of an inch of surface and that thinness of one two-hundred and fiftieth part of an inch, and this organ you showed it to be the great whispering gallery of the soul. And so all the human body has been explored and charted and mapped until we have come a way enchanted and worshipful.

We honor your profession for that work it has done for public hygiene. How often you have stood between this nation and Asiatic cholera or the yellow fever. The monuments in Greenwood, and Mount Auburn, and Laurel Hill tell something of the story of those physicians who stood face to face with pestilence in southern cities until, staggering in their own sickness, they stumbled over the corpses of those whom they had come to save. Your profession has been the successful advocate of ventilation, sewage, drainage, and fumigation until your sentiments were well expressed by Lord Palmerston, when he said to the English nation at the time a fast had been proclaimed to keep off the great pestilence: 'Clean your streets or death will ravage, notwithstanding all the prayers of this nation. Clean your streets and then call on God for help.'

We honor your profession for what it has done for longevity. There was such a fearful subtraction from human life there was a prospect that in a few centuries this world would be left uninhabitantless. Adam started with a whole eternity of earthly existence before him, but he cut off most of it, and only comparatively few years were left, only seven hundred years of life, and then five hundred, and then two hundred, and then fifty, and then down to an average of eighteen. But medical science came in, and since the sixteenth century the average of human life has risen from eighteen years to forty-four, according to some, and it will continue to rise until the average of human life will be fifty, and sixty, and seventy, and a man will have no right to die before ninety, and according to the statement of an old classic, 'the child shall die a hundred years old.' Millennium for the souls of men will be millennium for the bodies of men. Sin done, disease will be done: the clergyman and the physician getting through with their work at the same time.

I honor your profession for what it has done for the poor. No excuse now for any one in this country not having scientific attendance. The man who wrote the book entitled 'Every Man His Own Doctor' ought to write another book entitled 'Every Man His Own Undertaker.' Dispensaries and infirmaries everywhere, under the control of the best doctors, some of them poorly paid and some of them not paid at all. A half starved woman comes out from an old tenement house into the dispensary and unwraps the rags from her baby, a bundle of ulcers and rheum and pustules, and over that little sufferer bends the accumulated wisdom of the ages, from the first physician down to last week's autopsy. In one dispensary that I know of in one year one hundred and fifty thousand prescriptions were issued. God bless the doctors.

While we honor your profession for its achievements we sympathize with your hardships and annoyances. Dr. Rush used to say in his valedictory address to the students of the medical college: 'Young gentlemen, have two pockets, a large pocket and a small pocket, the large pocket in which to put your annoyances and your insults, the small pocket in which to put your fees.' In the first place the physician has no Sabbath. Busy merchants and lawyers and mechanics cannot afford to be sick during the secular week, and so they nurse themselves along with lozenges and horehound candy until Sabbath morning comes, and then they say: 'I must have a doctor.' That spoils the Sabbath morning church service for the physician. Besides that, there are many men who dine but once a week with their families. During the secular day they take a hasty lunch at the restaurant and on Sabbath they make up for their six days' abstinence by special gormandizing, which leaves their abused digestive organs crying out for the doctor, and they stuff and they stuff and they stuff until the food taken cannot be assimilated, and in their agitated digestive organs the lamb and the cow lie down together. And that spoils the evening church service for the doctor. Then physicians are annoyed by people coming too late. Men wait until the last fortress of physical strength is taken. Death has digged around it the trench of the grave, and then they want a doctor. The slight fever which might have been cured by foot-bath has become virulent typhus and the hacking cough a killing pneumonia. As though a captain should sink his ship off Amagansett and then put ashore in a yawl and hasten up to the marine office to get his vessel insured. Too late for the ship. Too late for the patient. Then the doctor gets blamed because the people die. 'Oh, how easy it is to cry out, 'Mischief!''

Then the physician must bear with all the whims and the sophistries and the deceptions and the stratagems and the irritations of the shattered nerves and beclouded brain of women, and more especially of men, who never know how gracefully to be sick and who with salivated mouths curse the doctor, giving him his dues as they say, about the only dues in that case to be collected. The fact is that some men who when they are well are so angelic in disposition you expect wings to come out from under their armpits, when sick are like a hyena sore-headed. The last bill paid is the doctor's bill. It seems so incoherent for a restored patient with ruddy cheeks and rotund form to be bothered with a bill charging him for old chloroform and jalap. The physicians of this country do more missionary work without charge than all the other professions put together. From the concert room and a merry party and the comfortable couch on a cold night, the thermometer five degrees below zero, the doctor must go right away. He always must go right away. Under this nervous strain how many have perished.

But I must congratulate the doctors on their present and future rewards. No one comes dearer into the affections of the people. Children cry out with glee: 'The doctor is coming,' and the octogenarian, arching his hand over his eyes, says: 'Doctor, is that you?' Some day, through overwork or from bending over a patient and catching his contagious breath, the doctor comes home and he lies down faint and sick. He is too weary to feel his own pulse or understand his own complaint. He is worn out. The fact is his work on earth is ended. Tell the people in the doctor's office they need not wait any longer. The doctor will never go there again. He has written his last prescription for the alleviation of human pain. People will run up his front steps and inquire: 'How is the doctor to-day?' All the sympathies of the neighborhood will be aroused, and there will be many prayers that he who has been so kind to the sick may be comforted in his last hour. It is all over now. In two or three days his patients, with shawls wrapped around them, will go to the front window and look out at the procession, and the poor of the city, barefooted and bareheaded, will stand on the street corner saying, 'Oh, how good he was to us!' Put on the other side the river of death some of his own patients who are forever cured will come out to welcome him, and the old Physician of heaven, with locks as white as snow, according to Apocalyptic vision, will confront him and say, 'Come in! come in! I was sick and ye visited me.'