Excerpt from The Relations of the Medical Profession to the State: Being the Anniversary Discourse Delivered Before the Medical Society of the State of New York, February Fifth, 1879 The country in which we live is still a new one. Many of our forests are primitive and much of our soil is uncultivated. Even in our oldest States we may see regions upon which man, by his residence and labor, seems hardly to have made a sensible effect. We have scarcely any of the garden-like cultivation of England, we have no wood-parks like Ardennes and Fontainebleau, no gray towers on our river banks, and few of the broad and hard highways over which Moltke's armies marched to Sedan and Paris. In our vast country there is a constantly recurring impression of newness, and, in a certain sense, of roughness. I am not unmindful of what we have achieved in the way of invention, manufacture, commerce, and culture. I merely wish to recall to your minds a fact that we are all perhaps inclined to forget, namely, that we are still a new people in a new land. We cannot inherit the fullness of cultivation of the older peoples in our intellectual work any more than in the cultivation of our soil. Our relations as individuals or as guilds and professions, to each other and to the government, must of necessity be different from those which obtain among older nations with their centuries of history and of tradition. In Europe there has been time for many things to arrange themselves into a refined system. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.