“D’un ennemi voulez vous defaire?
Ne cherchez pas d’assasins
Donnez lui deux medecins,
Et qui’ils soient d’avis contrarie.”
This professional jealousy is always more apparent than real. Aside from the rivalry for public patronage physicians are a very social class of men, as witness their many festive meetings. We banquet in honor of St. Luke the physician, and St. Come, after each thesis, at anniversaries, at the election of the Dean, and on many other occasions. It is these co-fraternal meetings at which are reinagurated the old feelings of good-fellowship; our little quarrels only serve to discipline the medical body and to increase the grandeur of the Faculty. It is the constant rubbing of surfaces that makes the true professional metal glitter.
When we hear new doctors, young graduates, swear the Hippocratic oath, we do not forget that the principal articles of the statute prescribe the cultivation of friendships, respect for the older members of the profession, benevolence to the young beginners, and the preservation of professional decency and kindness. It may be insisted that banquets are not to be considered as medical assemblages, for there they laugh long and loud, and drink many a bumper of rich Burgundy; making joyous discourse; holding to the famous compliment of Moliere:
Salus, honor et argentum
Atque bonum appetitum.
We know to-day many of the truthful precepts of the School of Salerno and their bearing on the medical records of the middle ages. Then as now the doctor had the ever increasing ingratitude of the patient (ad proccarendam oegrorum ingratitudinem).
“The disciple of Hippocrates meeteth often treatment rude,