Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Chicago Medical Center Reopening [PAGE 6]

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President Edmund Janes James: I regret exceedingly that I cannot be with you this epoch making day of the University of Illinois. I congratulate you and the University on the great significance of the permanent establishment of a Medical Department. The State is now fulfilling one of its greatest obligations to its citizens, and you personally deserve great credit for the indefatigable zeal you have exercised in its happy consummation. JOHN B. MURPHY. THE STATE AND MEDICAL EDUCATION. Representing the Faculty of a Sister Institution I Congratulate You on tiie New Relationship Consummated Today. Some may maintain that the State has an ethical right to educate practitioners of medicine;—I would say that the State has a moral obligation to do so. The highest function of the State is the protection of its citizens first in their property rights but more important than this,—in their health and well-being. To this end the State has established quarantines to protect those sound in body against infections by those who are sick; it has, through Boards of Health, protected the water supply of communities against contamination; it has through medical inspectors secured the purity and wholesomeness of the food supply; it has, through its health officers, brought about protection so far as possible against the spread and virulence of certain contagious diseases. Further to secure the highest efficiency in this service to the people the state licenses practitioners of medicine, carrying this licensure to the closely related professions, dentistry, pharmacy and nursing. State licensure is not simply a recognized right of the state, it is an ethical obligation of the state. Through licensure the state virtually controls the preparation of its practitioners for their work, and hence is only one step removed from control of Medical Education. Inasmuch as the state thus fixes the standards to which its licensed practitioners must conform, its obligation to furnish to its citizens facilities to gain the required efficiency must surely be as great as its obligation to furnish facilities for education in arts or in engineering.

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Your j^ister institutions not only congratulate you upon this occasion, we congratulate all who are interested in medical education and public health in the state. This new relation, today consummated, will enable our state to take her rightful position, and rapidly to reach her rightful rank in medical education, medical licensure, and in measures for vouchsafing public health. We confidently expect soon to see well equipped and maintained state laboratories of teaching and research, in which members of our

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