bers are considered a medical trust. Yet it is in the ranks of this very American Medical Association that are found the greatest number of unselfish devotees to preventive and curative medicine. It is within this association that are found the men who have added the greatest glory to the medical and scientific reputation of this country. America's greatest surgeons—Marion Simms, Gross, Sayer, O'Dwyer, Bull—were members of this association. McBurney, Jacobi, Stephen Smith, Welch, Osier and Trudeau have graced this association by their membership for nearly half a century. The heroes in the combat against yellow fever—Reed, Lazare and the hundred of others who have devoted their best energies and knowledge and often sacrificed their lives for the sake of medical science—were members of the American Medical Association.
One of the most illustrious members of the American Medical Association is its former president, Col. William C. Gorgas, of the U. S. Army, chief sanitary officer at Panama, an adherent to the regular school. It is thanks to the genius, the scientific and thorough medical training of Dr. Gorgas that the formerly deadly Isthmus of Panama has now become as sanitary a region as any. A great patriotic enterprise, important to commerce and the welfare of nations, was made possible by this man. He has labored and is constantly laboring for the establishment of a federal department of health because he knows the inestimable benefit which such a department would bestow upon the nation.
Whatever advance has been made in medical science in America or in Europe has been made by scientifically trained men or by physicians not without but within the ranks of the regular profession. The greatest benefactors of mankind are those who diminish disease by prevention and cure. As another illustrious example of medical benefactors, may I be permitted to cite that great trinity of scientific giants who through their labors have accomplished so much in reducing disease and lessening human misery in all parts of the globe? They are Pasteur of France, Lister of England and Koch of Germany; all of them aided their governments by direct participation in the governmental health departments. We are still mourning the death of perhaps the greatest of the three—Robert Koch. I do not believe that there is, even in the camp of our opponents in this so wrongly called "League for Medical Freedom," a single intelligent individual who will deny the inestimable benefits which Koch has bestowed upon mankind through his discovery of the germs of tuberculosis, of cholera, of the spores of anthrax, of tuberculin, and through his many other equally important scientific labors. Yet, had it not been for the Imperial German Reichsgesundheitsamt, which is the equivalent of the institution we are striving for—a federal department of health—Koch
