Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/488

 a tank as a little reservoir to supply a cottage with drinking water !

Then it is impossible to urge too strongly the claims upon you of the Medical sciences, and of the Medical art. When Surgeon-General Furnell spoke wise words on that subject in this pLice eight years ago, there was not a single Brahmin practising Medicine in Southern India. It is gratifying to know that there are now seven, of whom three are graduates, while four have passed their examinations, so that a beginning has been made; but we want the present numbers multiplied over and over again. We ought indeed to have many hundred trained men, and women, doctors, in this Presidency. That however is a "Counsel of perfection." It may well be that the times are not ripe for adding very hugely to our highly trained Medical practitioners; but a class is wanted imperatively wanted—of men and women, who have a certain tincture of European science, and who, accepting the methods of the Vythians, wherever they are sensible, and even wherever they are harmless, should push them aside only when they are distinctly and obviously mischievous. Who but you can, if you do not furnish, at least promote, the creation of this most useful band of intermediaries, and who has a right to advise you so to do, if not the grandson of the author of the Materia Indica?

Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas, the admirable saying two hundred years ago of Menage to Balzac, would, if it were taken to heart, do more good to India, aye, and to England, than half the winged words, which the most distinguished orators have uttered in our days.

There are a thousand ways in which your co-operation might aid the Government to do things which no Government can do by itself. The annual mortality in this Presidency, for example, from fever alone, is very considerably over two hundred thousand. It distances the mortality from cholera, even in the worst cholera years.

Well, a great many of these lives could be quite certainly The virtue of saved by the use of the cinchona alkaloids, and what is more, a prodigious number of other lives, which are not absolutely destroyed by fever, might be made much happier and more useful, if only you would devote yourselves, when occasion serves, to spreading a knowledge of the virtues of the cinchona alkaloids amongst your less educated