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250 251 This is the soil of the future. This is India today. By a very fortunate set of circumstances, a grant was made available so that I might spend a summer before graduating from medical school traveling around the world. Through the honesty and frankness of the people of the nations I visited, I had the privilege of observing at first hand the conditions in which one half of the world’s population exists. There were many obvious benefits from the trip. For me, it was a broadening experience socially, culturally, and medically. A section of the world unfolded with a heritage far older than our Western one, with problems that are but history in the United States, and with struggles we have never known. One quickly loses the idea that our system, be it in medicine or any other field, is the only one, or even that it is the best one for situations so foreign to those in America. The Descendants of the High Kings of Ireland Speech at the Annual Banquet of the American Irish Historical Society, 1982 I have been the President-General of the American Irish Historical Society since 1974. Each year, according to the bylaws of the society, I must deliver an annual address. I include two examples since the society and my ethnicity have been important factors in the life of my family. In Sliabh Luachra, in the shadow of the Paps of Dana, along the Kerry/Cork border, there are hills and vales of great beauty and many small, poor farms. From these remote hills came the great Gaelic poets Egan O’Rahilly and Owen Roe O’Sullivan. A harsher reality can be found in local statistics documenting extreme his final contributions. The patient who experiences that creative tension between suffering and pain must be sustained by both the art and the science of medicine. Thus, the perspective of the physician is indispensable to even the spiritual assessment of this complex and universal experience. A Medical Student’s Impressions of India Extract from the New Y ork State Journal of Medicine, 1960 These are introductory paragraphs from my first article in a medical journal which held, in retrospect, seeds for a future career in tropical medicine and international health. The crowd had gathered slowly, and sheltering themselves from the 105 degree heat, the natives waited under mango tree. By noon, there were a few hundred people dressed in saris, dhotis, or nothing at all. From habit they grouped themselves so that all the lepers were under one tree, those with scabies were under another, and those with malnutrition and new complaints were under a third. They came, as they come each week, with their two annas (one penny), their tin cans, ragged clothes, hope, and trust. For this was the day the bus from the central hospital in south India arrived at its roadside clinics. Within an hour and a half, the doctors had come and gone, and the villagers were alone again for another week. Many areas do not have a rural health program which is even this extensive. Yet this is where 300 odd million people live, dream, and die. Often this is considered the fulcrum between Eastern and Western ideologies. 252 253 better life. These American Irish heroes did not leave the soft, gentle Ireland celebrated in song.The wealthy land owner and the city gentleman did not leave. Our ancestors were the survivors of oppression and famine, those desperate enough to seek refuge in steerage. But when their spirit burst forth upon this great land of the United States, they and the nation prospered. They gave a strength to America that still nourishes her. The broad backs of the Irish laborers opened this nation’s frontiers, built her railroads, dug her tunnels, and policed her streets. They were hod carriers and longshoremen, plumbers, painters, the domestic servants, cooks and nannies and, soon enough, the politicians, lawyers and doctors. With few publicized exceptions,thejourneyfrompovertytosecuritywasnot linked with lace curtains but with hard work, humor, a deep faith, and an almost unreasonable optimism in the future of the United States. Eighty five years ago a group of immigrant realists gathered, unheralded, in a cold Boston hotel room, and dreamed, not of the ancient past, but of a better future - for America and Ireland - and they began the tradition that we experience once again this evening. Out of steerage and fear and poverty, they determined that the Annual Meeting of...

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