President Dickey's Eulogy
Following is the text of the remarks byPresident Dickey at the memorial servicefor Drs. Miller and Quinn, held in RollinsChapel on Saturday afternoon, May 9.
WE are met here as individuals and as a community to honor the memory of two who both in their lives and in their going have shown us the way. Can we not say on the authority of the ages that man has no greater mission than so to live and so to die that the meaning of life is by life itself enlarged? Such at least was the privilege of these men.
Ralph Miller and Robert Quinn were physicians. As practitioners of both its ancient art and its modern science, they personified medicine at its best. There is no need to dwell on their professional dedication to the healing of human ills; they stand in a tradition that speaks for itself to all mortals. It is fitting that we should speak our awareness and our pride that even within such a tradition of ministering to the stricken the quality of their ministry stands out. The occasion of their going arose because, despite the power of their expertness to draw patients to them, they freely chose to take their hard-won knowledge and skill to faraway patients in this north country who could not come to them. This quality of willingness has always been the golden thread in every ministry to the human plight and when, as now, such willingness is seen revealed in its ultimate form we are permitted in our grief to know that the Biblical truth abides: "greater love hath no man than this."
Dr. Quinn was a young man as life is counted by arithmetic. The scroll of his career is thus not a long one, but it was a good one. From the vantage of patient, colleague or friend, he was concerned, he was wise, he was gentle and he was always there. People and their troubles mattered to him as, indeed, did dogs and their problems. We once puzzled together about whether on balance men taught dogs more than dogs taught them. No conclusion was reached.
The career of Dr. Miller had a longer span but all who knew him also know that here was a life with dimensions and reach and variations utterly beyond any formula of measurement. The memory of such a life must not be suppressed into any summary of words. It is itself a living part of each of us: the hundreds of doctors he helped to educate; the specialists in pathology throughout northern New England who were reared under the rigor of his intellect and self-imposed standards; his colleagues in the Mary Hitchcock Clinic whose diagnoses so often rested on his reliability; the countless Dartmouth men who learned enjoyment of the out-of-doors, especially the fun of good skiing, under his unobtrusive aegis; and the host of others who in nameless ways through him touched the pulse of life's adventure. We are not surprised that such a man went on only after all within his doing was done.
We who are bound to these men by family, profession, friendship or the common lot of humankind have learned once again the power of men to do all men proud.
