Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/6

 with the grander proportions of the building in which they are delivered?

The successive changes which have led up to the present development of the school have been both material and intellectual. The former were more or less accidental; the latter were organic and normal, the legitimate result of a higher and wider culture. It is well known how for years the Medical Faculty panted for more breathing room, for wider space to hold and to display its treasures and for experimental research and teaching; and above all for a clinical institution in which it should be at home, and in which its own professors, or others in complete harmony with them, should carry to the bedside the traditional doctrines and practice of the University.

This longing has at last been satisfied. These objects, which for so long a time were regarded as remote possibilities, to be hoped for, worked for, prayed for, even, but hardly looked for, have now become realities. Yonder smiles the beautiful face of our hospital, offering health to the sick, soundness to the maimed, and to all sufferers protection and care; and here we are assembled in an edifice whose equal in extent, in architectural stateliness, and in adaptation to its objects, does not exist among the medical schools of this country, nor even, I believe, in Europe. By a singular chain of events the memorable translation of the University to its present site was accomplished. The first link in the chain was the need of the United States of a site for the national public offices required in Philadelphia. The formation of the second link depended upon the success of the Board of Trustees in convincing a government commission that no place was so well fitted for the purpose as the old site of the University. That being determined favorably, the possibility of further progress depended upon the purchase from the city of this ground at a moderate price; still later it depended upon the appropriation of a large sum of money by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, which, in its turn, was made contingent upon the subscription of an equally large sum by private liberality. If any