The President's annual address / by Robert Battey.

  • Battey, Robert, 1828-1895.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The President's annual address / by Robert Battey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    15/22 (page 11)
    and delivered, and officially recorded, thus giving due notice to the public at large. In the absence of such record and public notice the exclusive title of the claimant is, in general, restricted to the short space of one year. It would be a liaid- ship indeed to allow a claimant for land to hold his titles in secret for an unlimited number of years, whilst the party in possession is expending his labor and his money without stint in the improvement of the estate, and with the purpose of building up a property for the future enjoyment of himself and his posterity. Our statutes of limitations, too, are traceable far beyond the English common law to a Divine origin; for in the earlier periods of biblical history we find that the services of a bonds- man were limited by the Mosaic law to the space of six years. A claim by title based upon the right of discovery of new territory made by a government officer, commanding a govern- ment vessel, fitted out and manned at public expense for the purpose, is everywhere disallowed. Whilst it is customary to grant some gratuity in lands, in money, or in honors to the discoverer, the right and title to the newly acquired posses- sions vest in the Crown or in the government fitting out the expedition. In me<licine individual members of the profession receive freely and without price their outfit for life’s work from the common stock of human knowledge. They are under solemn obligations to use it for the common good, and to add some- thing, in their day and generation, to the accumulated fund from which they themselves have freely drawn. Discoveries and inventions which they may make in the use of this com- mon fund vest no exclusive title in them to such advance- ments. They may ju.stly claim credit for their labor and proper recognition of their merits as discoverers, but the right and title to the things discovered vest not in them but in the medical profession itself, which has furnished them from its storehouse of centuries the tools and the outfit with which they labor.