Page:Hospitals, medical science and public health.djvu/10

 without the enthusiasm of their presence. Still I repeat 'by no means alone.' For it is the older men, such as he who now addresses you, who see most vividly, and feel most keenly, that the fountains of life ever renewed, and of progress reinforced and accelerated, have their springs not in our generation but in the bands of eager young men whom year by year and day by day our universities bear in their pride. And if sometimes these fervid youths are inwardly disposed to scorn our ingatherings, to despise our experience, and even to hold our wisdom in suspicion,—well, it is better than if they had fed themselves with our formulas and fondled our idols. Social development has always been discontinuous; and a succession of slightly explosive generations is better than the alternative of revolution, of catastrophe by longer accumulation of pent-up stresses.

Permit me on the threshold of this new infirmary to make a few remarks on hospital purposes and management. Of the management of the Manchester Infirmary I know nothing, so that under this head no word of mine can be charged with censure or innuendo. I speak generally when I say that a prevailing error in hospital government is the failure of the lay managers to act in frank and equal partnership with the medical managers, whereby the full cooperation and best results of money and knowledge are more or less diminished; the machine runs with needless friction, and occasionally jams.

That money is of more value than knowledge is a vulgar and erroneous notion; yet in our partnership too often the lay manager presumes that the physician or surgeon is at the hospital not his partner but in some sort his servant. Occasionally indeed he ventures to depreciate the equal benevolence of the medical services, on the ground that if unsalaried they "pay" in profit and reputation. But do we find that in other professions public officers—as a clerk to justices, for instance, as a solicitor to a great banking company, as a consulting engineer or chemist to gas or water works are unsalaried, because the office carries with it opportunities, reputation, and fees! By no means, The other