nor let others rest until the success of the project was assured. If,
against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only my
revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he was
urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently active and
triumphantly successful.

We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:
that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy regular
practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the Boston
Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University; the
Treadwell Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the collections
of the two societies, that for Medical Improvement and that for Medical
Observation; and more especially the ten thousand volumes relating to
medicine belonging to our noble public city library,--too many blossoms
on the tree of knowledge, perhaps, for the best fruit to ripen. But the
Massachusetts Medical Society now numbers nearly four hundred members in
the city of Boston. The time had arrived for a new and larger movement.
There was needed a place to which every respectable member of the
medical profession could obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all
might find the special information they were seeking; where the latest
medical intelligence should be spread out daily as the shipping news is
posted on the bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common
pursuit could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art;
where the whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge
as the apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments. This was
what the old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the profession,
who

"Desired it long,
But died without the sight."

This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance
undertook to give us. And now such a library, such a reading-room, such
an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we be hold
a fact, plain before us. The medical profession of our city, and, let
us add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach with its iron
arms, is united as never before by the commune vinculum, the common bond
of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish interest. It breathes a new
air of awakened intelligence. It marches abreast of the other
learned professions, which have long had their extensive and valuable
centralized libraries; abreast of them, but n