The President's Address. By G. S. Woodhead. Ill 



present advanced and advancing position. When such marked 

 and extraordinary changes were found to have taken place in the 

 organs of the body, physicians asked : " How can a patient with 

 organs so diseased possibly remain alive ? " and they came to be 

 amongst the most pessimistic of men. On the post-mortem table 

 they saw but the final lesions or products of disease, and whenever 

 a physician was called to treat a patient suffering from one of the 

 diseases the morbid anatomy of which had been studied, he recog- 

 nized that he had seen the lesions on the post-mortem table, and 

 assumed that the disease must necessarily follow the course of 

 those of his previous cases that had proved mortal. Morbid 

 anatomy could carry him no further ; and it was only as it came 

 to be realized that, with the aid of the Microscope, changes invisible 

 to the uneducated and unaided eye could be demonstrated, that 

 men gradually learned that lesions or damage to organs and tissues 

 must have small beginnings which might easily be righted ; but 

 that, once begun, unless checked by treatment, natural or artificial, 

 they must, after passing through various stages and phases, become 

 like the lesions seen on the post-mortem table, the patient then 

 being able to withstand their ravages no longer. The Microscope, 

 then, came as a harbinger of hope to the physician. 



Normal histology is still a growing science, and much remains 

 to be done in this field of investigation ; but with each step made, 

 pathological histology has advanced — always a step behind, it may 

 be, but seldom more than that step. The medical student of to-day 

 knows more of the histology of the kidney, for example, normal 

 and pathological, than did Malpighi, Henle or Bowman ; and has 

 a knowledge of other organs and tissues that was hidden from the 

 teacher of thirty years ago. As a result of all this, internal medi- 

 cine has gradually come to be studied on the same plan and plane 

 as external medicine, and is, indeed, now making more rapid strides 

 than surgery, which, however, it often calls upon to complete its 

 work. 



Our late distinguished President, Dr. Plimmer, in his interesting 

 and illuminating address on the Dutch erstwhile linendraper's 

 apprentice and Bedellus,* told us how his hero Leeuwenhoek, a non- 

 medical man, opened up the way along which physicians and sur- 

 geons were in after years to toil so arduously, but in the long run, 

 under the leadership of another brilliant layman, so successfully. 

 In these days of biological chemistry and of theories of immunity, 

 men are apt to forget or to lose sight of the path by which we have 

 arrived at our present heights, though they realize clearly enough 

 that no great advances have been made in our knowledge of the 

 functions of the human body until accurate information has been 

 gained as to their structure, first with the aid of the scalpel, and then 



* See this Journal, 1913, p. 121. 



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