The Harveian oration, 1880 : delivered June 25th / by John W. Ogle.

  • Ogle, John W. (John William), 1824-1905.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Harveian oration, 1880 : delivered June 25th / by John W. Ogle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 1880. Mr. President and Fellows, Courteous and Learned Visitors,—This is the great feast of our medical year, as it were our Asclepieia, formerly observed by us on the day sacred to the St. Luke of our Gospels—the “beloved physician”—October i8, but now kept on the anniversary of the opening of the building* in which we are now assembled. We are here gathered amidst “those monuments of vanished minds,” the effigies, the books, relics, and memorials of our ancestors, “ kindred spirits who rule us even from the tomb,” in obedience to the will of one whose name is, and ever will remain, a household word, not only with men of our profession, but with all men of true science, and with all in- the world who have at heart the welfare of the great body of Humanity. We meet, each and all, to add a leaf to the laurel chaplet on the brow of the venerable and illustrious Harvey—still the chief honour and ornament of our College, as his friend Dr. Ent called him—to casf sweet incense upon his altar-fire, to do hearty and peculiar homage to his undying memory, and to the grand work and method which for all time he has set before us his disciples as biologists and as praetical physicians—“ engaging in the sacred things of Apollo,”*]* to * By the President, Sir Henry Halford, June 25, 1825. t Possibly in saying this Harvey had in mind the following words put into Apollo’s mouth by Ovid (see Metam., lib. i., 517, when describing the trans- formation of Daphne into a laurel) :— “ . . . Per me, quod eritque, fuitque, Estque, patet : per me concordant carmina nervis. Certa quidem nostra est, nostra tamen una sagitta certior, in vacuo quce vulnera pectofe fecit Inventum ntcdicina mcum est, opiferque per orbem dicor, et harbarum subjecta polcntia nobis.'