IT IS ALWAYS a difficult task to praise famous men, the more difficult for me in the case of Dr. Blackfan since this particular Blackfan Memorial Lecture is also linked with the memory of Dr. Bronson Crothers. Dr. Wilson's admirable biographical memoir of Dr. Blackfan could bring him to life for the reader if anything could. Yet the fact is that I knew Dr. Crothers: I mourned his death and he is therefore as alive for me as if he was sitting in the front row lighting and relighting a much tortured pipe. As you know, Dr. Crothers was to me a hero, as evidently was Dr. Blackfan to his students, yet in the schoolboy sense of the word he lacked one conventional attribute of heroism. I refer to the olympian attitude of mind which one is apt to expect from the favorites of the Gods and which was so conspicuous a part of the therapeutic armamentarium of the physicians of the nineteenth century and indeed some of them today. He was the antithesis of Robert Louis Stevenson's fashionable physician, Sir Faraday Bond, who as you may remember, would call you back even after you had paid your fee, to say with stentorian emphasis "I had forgotten one caution: avoid kippered sturgeon as you would the very devil." In his gentle way, Dr. Crothers spoke the truth to the parents of his patients; if they found it too uncomfortable they might leave him but they always came back eventually when they realized that it was on the basis of acceptance of the tragic fact of the permanency of brain damage that most could be done to help their children.