Page:The Evolution of Surgery.djvu/10

 a character not unlike that of Southam. He had the same quiet efficiency. He had the same faculty of doing rather than of talking. We might fairly have hoped that twenty years hence he might have retired with a long record of useful service for our school and for surgery. But like so many others of our colleagues he has been cut off early in his career, and we can retain only the memory of what he was and the inspiration of what he would have been. Such a loss is irreparable and you will all feel with me to-day how much we are the poorer by this last gap in our ranks.

Nor can we meet to-day without recalling another loss: the loss of one who was not a member either of our profession or of our University but who had done more than many of ourselves to promote the welfare of this school. If, as I believe, the greatest aim of medical education is to provide the public with able practitioners, if the first essential for so doing is the perfection of our clinical teaching, and if, as our experience has shown, this demands a close and more than friendly co-operation between our University and the Medical Staff and Board of Management of our Hospital, then indeed we owe a debt of gratitude to the work of John Dewhurst Milne. His courtesy, his breadth of view, his perfect honesty, the intense loveableness of the man—these things have done more for us than can be readily appreciated by those who have not been closely associated with the working of our school. I am not alone in this room to-day in having lost in him one of the dearest and best of friends.

But to-day, Gentlemen, we are concerned not with our personal losses but with the gains of that art which so many of you will practise in the years to come, and I hope to trace with you something of the evolution of surgery as I have seen it since the time when I had the