only causes of death will be old age
and injury; but a decided prolongation of the average lifetime, such as
the life-insurance companies recognize, is an unquestionable gain to the
human race.

A great blessing that has been brought about in great measure by medical
men has been the establishment of the profession of nursing. The work of
caring for the sick between the physician's visits is no longer, at
least in large communities and in cases of severe illness, left to
over-sympathetic and uninstructed relatives or to outsiders who traded
on mystery. An intelligent and intelligible record is now kept of all
important happenings in the sick room, remedies are administered as they
were ordered, needless alarm at something deemed by the patient to be of
ill omen is quelled, and in case of real emergency, overlooked as it
might otherwise have been, the physician is summoned to meet it. The
advent of the trained nurse marked an era in medicine.

The literature of medicine has fully kept pace in volume with the
progress of the art itself, and its quality has steadily improved. To
this the great tomes of that gigantic work, the "Index-Catalogue of the
Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army," bear
solid testimony. It is a consolidated catalogue, by subjects and by
authors' names, of practically every medical book published throughout
the world and of every article in the periodical literature of medicine.
For its existence the world is indebted to Dr. John S. Billings,
formerly a surgeon of high rank in the army and now the director of the
New York Public Library, and for its continued existence to the United
States Government, and it is to be hoped that Congress will never cease
to provide adequately for its continued publication. Its completeness
and its accuracy long ago led to its being prized everywhere.

There are some problems of which medicine has hardly yet entered upon
the solution. Prominent among them is that of cancer. Little as we now
know of the real nature of that disease, we know quite as much of it as
we knew but a few years ago concerning other diseases equally
destructive and far more prevalent, which, however, we have now
practically mastered. Who can say that we shall not triumph over cancer
while the Twentieth Century is still young? Our final triumph is
indubitable.

The strongest individuality in the medicine of the Nineteenth Century
was without doubt that of Rudolf Ludwig Ka