Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/7

 one of the links in this chain of contingencies had been broken, the whole scheme must have ended disastrously.

But not one of them was allowed to fail. Wise heads, and courageous, earnest hearts were leagued together to render the project successful. The Board of Trustees, to whom the active inception of the matter, and all the legal and administrative steps towards its completion, necessarily belonged, may well be proud to look upon the monument they have erected to their imperishable honor. The Provost, to whose official and personal influence in legislative bodies so much is due: The Professors in the Medical Department, some of whom labored with distinguished success in obtaining the funds for the erection and endowment of the hospital: The Hospital Professor of Clinical Medicine, whose earnest, judicious, and devoted espousal of the cause of that Institution entitles him to peculiar honor: The Committee and members of the society of the medical alumni, and others still, within the University as well as in the general public, who have contributed by their wise counsel, their devoted labors, and their generous gifts, to carry this grand scheme forward to the completion which you this day witness: To one and all of them this public acknowledgment is most justly due. Their efforts have been successful and their plans were consummated, not only because they were earnest and diligent, but because they were made in behalf of an institution whose long history warranted a belief in its permanency, and whose merits are attested by professional and scientific achievements which there is no one to question; and because the public felt assured that the efforts made in behalf of our medical school were prompted by no selfish or narrow spirit, and that its gifts in land, or money, or labor, or in whatever else, were sure to be wisely and honestly administered. They saw in this school the same elements of permanency which belong to the most stable of earthly institutions; the zeal of the Faculty for an enlarged and elevated curriculum, moderated and controlled by the very constitution of the University as well as by the condition of the medical profession generally; just as they might have seen, or may hereafter see, the conservatism of the