Message to the Atlantic City Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons.

[ Read by Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President ]

WHEN THE distinguished Chairman of the Board of Regents, Dr. Ravdin, brought to me last summer your gracious invitation to speak to this Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons, I very much hoped to be able to accept for two excellent reasons.

As you may recall, I have a personal reason to appreciate Dr. Ravdin's great skill as a surgeon. In the second place, there was something I wanted to say to your organization which, from its inception, has sought to elevate professional standards and professional responsibility in its field of endeavor.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to come before you in person tonight; but I hope that you will, nonetheless--since this is my birthday--accept a few words from me by proxy.

The American College of Surgeons has reason to be proud of its accomplishments through four decades of service; proud of its Clinical Congresses--such as the one now here convened--where younger men report on the progress of their research and receive the interested encouragement of their honored elders; proud especially, I think of its program setting high standards in American hospitals, inaugurated early in the College's history, maintained for many years by the College's efforts alone, but now recognized everywhere as a massive contribution toward improving the care of America's sick.

In past years, you did not wait for challenging problems to come to you. It was your spirit to go out and find the problems, to meet their challenge, and to discharge fully and well the responsibilities you volunteered to undertake. I admire that spirit. It is the kind of spirit that has made America what she is today. I want to say to you tonight: keep everlastingly at the same kind of good work.

I am told that the advances in medical knowledge in the last two decades are greater than in all previous recorded time. The surgeon of today must digest and apply a vast accumulation of wisdom.

Possessed of his special qualifications and armed with this wider knowledge, the surgeon owes all the more a responsibility to the society of which he is an integral part; a responsibility to help make our democratic processes work.

In Revolutionary times, Dr. Benjamin Rush felt such a responsibility. He was, indeed, a fine doctor and a great teacher of medicine. Benjamin Rush was much more: an ardent champion of independence for the Colonies, a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a prime mover in the Pennsylvania convention to ratify the Constitution, and, later, for fifteen years Treasurer of the United States Mint. Doctor Rush put all his talents out to work.

We can all remember the role played by the family doctor of our youth. His was not only a skill to care of the sick. He was the adviser, the friend, the comforter, the wise guide. Of all that went on in his community, the good family doctor was a part.

No profession--whether it be medical or legal or teaching, or any other--is merely a learned society of scholars, living within its own boundaries and rules, like a medieval fraternity.

Each qualified doctor is a vital element in the swift-moving era in which we live, with a role to play transcending the use of his special surgical skill.

No learned man can stand today at one side. Each must shoulder a share of the burden. The more significant his learning, the greater is his responsibility.

You members of the American College of Surgeons are leaders in the art and science of surgery. You have thereby the greater obligations--to continue the great advances in your beneficent art, to continue unremitting research into the unknown, to continue. teaching today's student so that he may become tomorrow's surgeon; you have all of these obligations certainly, which are yours by right. But, over and above these particular cares, you must take your part in preserving and strengthening the kind of society that has made America's past and present possible.

The waters of liberty flow from one source: voluntary initiative and effort. In these complex modern days, too often we find the spring drying up for want of volunteers. Too much dependence on the arm of Government. Too much turning to taxation to supply what initiative once sought out.

Certainly there are many things which local, state, and federal governments can and must contribute. But personal freedoms are better preserved in a team or a partnership than through overdependence. In a free democracy like ours, less and less, not more and more, should devolve on Government. All citizens--the leaders in surgery like the leaders in other walks of life--should be vigilant to find ways--outside of Government--to carry forward their essential services to man.

My wish tonight, for each and all of you in your learned assemblage here, is that you will continue to do in the future, as you have so finely done in the past, your part in keeping American surgery in leadership in the relief of pain and the cure of disease, and-over and beyond that--in helping to preserve the individual, American way of achieving the goals of free men.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER