Message to Meetings of the Nationwide Clinical Conference on Heart Ailments.

[Delivered over closed circuit television from the White House]

IT IS a privilege to greet you tonight, and to express my gratification at the purpose of your separate but united meetings from coast-to-coast. Your program tonight, as it has been described to me, is another example in our society of the collaboration between free enterprise and pure learning--an instance in which business and the medical profession work together for the common good.

If the annual toll from coronary heart disease were revealed to the American people as a casualty list from the battlefield, the effect would be one of national shock, and a demand that something be done. That something is being done, in such programs as the one tonight, is significant, and encouraging.

You, the physicians of America, are linked in this enterprise by a bond far stronger than the cables of a television network. Your bond of union is a common and selfless aim. Your principal motives are first, a concern for the welfare of your patients, and second, that restless curiosity, that hunger for knowledge of better ways, which is the hallmark of the man of science.

Our way of life provides the climate in which the chronic questioner is free to rove, to doubt, to explore, in the endless search for new and fuller answers. Every assistant in a laboratory, every researcher, every medical student, every specialist, every family doctor, is a participant in this search--a search which has added twenty-five years to the American life span within the memory of many of you in this audience.

These new years of expectancy have been a bonus beyond price added to the wealth of our Republic. For them we, your fellow Americans, owe you our grateful thanks.

A nation's strength is directly affected by its people's health. In that light, we must strengthen and support those agencies of Government which are concerned with the problems of national health.

Yet, the role of Government in these matters must always be secondary, and supplementary. The first responsibility lies with the community, determined to foster good health and to provide well for the ailing and the injured; with the scientist, as he works in freedom towards goals of his own choosing; and with the physician, who brings his healing ministry not to the State, or to the mass of people as such, but always to some man, or woman, or child--some individual human being worthy of his dedicated care.

Godspeed you on your mission.