Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

566 HENRY BAIRD FAVILL
wide experience with people of all kinds — the highest and
lowest, the richest and poorest, the best and the worst —
the real difficulties of life are brought to him.
Every gradation of society, if he is wise and capable
of growth, gives him in the end a comprehensive view of
humanity such as I believe no other individual in the community
has an opportunity to get, and, consequently, such
as no other individual really does have. That is why the
physician is led into all this, not because he knows so much
more but because his type of life gives him this intimate
association with every kind of person, and gives him the
broadest sympathy, the keenest judgment, and the largest
fund of resources as to what to do under given circumstances.
And it is true that the physician consequently
becomes the adviser of the particular part of the community
in which he moves, and he grows broader, and finally sometimes
comes to be very broad.
There is another point to all this — another side. We
say people submit their troubles to the physician. Why?
Because they are unequal to them; because the complexity
of life is so great and the large majority of people are not
equal to handling it.
All the trouble of the world originates and has to do
with the family. Everything that you can conceive in the
way of human suffering has its unit of activity, and its unit
of suffering, in the family, and the consequence is that the
physician is the individual who is most called upon, outside
of the family, to participate in those matters. Whatever
it may be, the physician is the individual who is called
in for counsel and for help.
I
am tr>^ing to show you that this question of being a doctor
is not a mere matter of writing a prescription and going
on. This being a doctor, if you are anything, is the being
willing to be the confidential recipient of every human
trouble, and the adviser, so far as in you lies, of every individual
who has trouble.
Of all the calHngs now known to