Section IV., 1913. [3] Trans. R.S.C. 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



The Relationshi]} of Medicine to other Natural Sciences. 

 By Albert G. Nicholls, M.A., M.D., D.Sc. 



(Delivered May 27th 1913.) 



From one point of view all mankind may be divided into two great 

 classes — doctors and patients. Those of my hearers who have not the 

 good fortune to be doctors, Doctors of Medicine I mean, may have the 

 somewhat questionable consolation of at some time coming under the 

 secondary category, if they have not already experienced that privilege. 

 For this reason, the onerous, though honourable, duty devolving upon 

 me of delivering the presidential address to the members of Section IV 

 is considerably lightened, for from the outset I am assured of a sym- 

 pathetic hearing. Indeed, the interest in things medical is well-nigh 

 universal. How else can we understand the mental attitude of the 

 average man, who not only doses himself with all kinds of advertised 

 and proprietary nostrums, but insists on forcing them down the gullets 

 of his friends? This interest is no doubt, honestly come by, for in it 

 we perceive, not only that wonderment which attends on all natural 

 phenomena, but also the credulity which at times afflicts even the 

 strongest of us. Perhaps we might, farther, regard it, as it were, as a 

 reversion to an ancestral condition, for the time was when medicine, 

 like philosophy, mathematics, astrology, rhetoric, literature, formed 

 an essential part of a polite education. The De Medicina of A. Cornelius 

 Celsus, a Roman patrician who lived about the first century, was one 

 of a series of treatises on universal knowledge, intended for the instruc- 

 tion of the accomplished man of the world. Pliny, who was not a doctor, 

 and who ridiculed the Medicine of his day, nevertheless thought it his 

 duty to include in his Natural History a compendium of popular Medi- 

 cine. With the limited scope of knowledge in those ancient times, 

 it was inevitable that Medicine should be regarded as a part of philosophy 

 and, as such, a proper field for intellectual speculation. There is still 

 a philosophic side to Medicine, but the scientific Medicine of to-day 

 can claim to rank with the other so-called natural sciences in that, 

 like them, is it based upon observation and experiment. Its proper cul- 

 tivation calls for at least a working knowledge of such branches of 

 knowledge as physics, chemistry, anatomy, botany, zoology, biology, 

 and physiology. Only thus can the marvellous workings of the animal 



