INTRODUCTION 



BY PROFESSOR D. NOEL PATON, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 



ON looking back over a forty years' association with physiology 

 nothing is more striking than the influence which the application 

 of physics has exercised upon the progress of the sciences. 



I well remember that, as long ago as 1878, my first teacher 

 began his lectures on the Institutes of Medicine by defining 

 physiology as the application of physics and chemistry to the 

 study of the body in action. 



But at that time the possibility of applying these sciences was 

 limited. In the first place, their development, and especially 

 the development of physics, was not sufficiently advanced. The 

 dissociation of atoms into ions was hardly recognised, the 

 significance of Graham's colloids was not appreciated, and 

 the phenomena of surface tension had hardly been applied to 

 molecular physics. In the second place, physiologists were then 

 generally men trained for medicine whose education in physics 

 and chemistry had been extremely limited. Of course, there 

 were notable exceptions e.g. Helmholtz and du Bois Reymond. 



These older physiologists had to be content with recording 

 phenomena rather than with explaining them, and they loved to 

 chronicle their observations in high-sounding Greek names. 

 Can one ever forget the sense of profound knowledge which one 

 enjoyed as a junior student in mastering such terms as " delo- 

 morphous " and " adelomorphous " as descriptive of the cells of 

 the stomach ? The so-called chemical physiologists were perhaps 

 the worst offenders. For, having isolated, or thought they had 

 isolated, some constituent of the body of quite unknown chemical 

 constitution, they promptly gave it a name with no connection 

 with its chemical nature, and these names have generally con- 

 tinued in use, to the confusion of generations of students. In the 

 present age of " hormones " and " vitamines " one wonders how 

 far the tendency has been eradicated. 



XI 



