"The Senior Practitioner" (Kipling, 1908)

Excerpts from a speech delivered by Rudyard Kipling to the medical students of Middlesex Hospital in 1908:

I have had the good fortune this afternoon of meeting a number of trained men who, in due time, will be drafted into your permanently mobilized army which is always in action, always under fire against Death. Of course it is a little unfortunate that Death, as the senior practitioner, is always bound to win in the long run, but we noncombatants, we patients, console ourselves with the idea that it will be your business to make the best terms you can with Death on our behalf; to see how his attacks can best be delayed or diverted, and when he insists on driving the attack home, to take care that he does it according to the rules of civilized warfare...

You have been and always will be exposed to the contempt of the gifted amateur—the gentleman who knows by intuition everything that it has taken you years to learn. You have been exposed—you always will be exposed—to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world’s most bitter agonies—the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering...

You remain now perhaps the only class that dares to tell the world that we can get no more out of a machine than we put into it; that if the fathers have eaten forbidden fruit the children’s teeth are very liable to be affected. Your training shows you daily and directly that things are what they are and that their consequences will be what they will be—and that we deceive no one but ourselves when we pretend otherwise.

The full text of the speech is in the current issue of Lapham's Quarterly.