Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Sketch of Dr. John Peter Mettauer of Virginia: The President's Address to the American Surgical Association July 5, 1905
Gentlemen: Your magnanimity and generosity have never been more conspicuously displayed than on this occasion, when you have chosen the humblest of your group to stand in the most exalted position within the gift of the American profession.
Your wisdom may be questioned, but your generosity and for bearance are so certain that I enter on the discharge of my duties in full confidence of your kindly treatment and indulgent support. It is hardly too much to say that the highest ambition that a man could nurture might well be satisfied with such fulfilment which confers by your partial kindness the foremost official position in the highest profession of the greatest nation in the world.
One of the gravest and most distinguished of historians opens one of his greatest books with the inquiry whether he is about to do any worthy work or not. Such doubt must assail everyone at the threshold of every task, but the biographer and the historian are at least more nearly removed from its in?uence than any other man.
In all directions of scientific inquiry the startling discovery of to-day is the truism of to-morrow, and the hand-book of one generation is the curio of the next. In literature, in which it is the main design to entertain, the general taste is so sudden and sure in its changes that hardly anything can be more certain than the passing away from favor of school after school of novelist and poet.
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