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ASSOCIATIONS FOR ADVANCEMENT OP SCIENCE. (BRITISH.) 



gen rays." A case that occurred in the practice of 

 Howard Marsh was cited. "He was called to see a 

 severe injury of the elbow, in which the swelling 

 was so great as to make it impossible for him, by 

 ordinary means of examination, to decide whether 

 he had to deal with a fracture or a dislocation. If 

 it were the latter a cure could be effected by the 

 exercise of violence, which would be not only use- 

 less but most injurious if a bone was broken. By 

 the aid of the Rontgen rays a photograph was taken, 

 in which the bone of the upper arm was clearly seen 

 displaced forward on those of the forearm. The 

 diagnosis being thus established, Mr. Marsh pro- 

 ceeded to reduce the dislocation : and his success 

 was proved by another photograph, which showed 

 the bones in their natural relative position." The 

 discovery of the exact position of a half-penny in a 

 boy's gullet by Dr. Macintyre was referred to. " This 

 is the jubilee of anaesthesia in surgery. That price- 

 less blessing to mankind came from America." Sir- 

 Joseph then gave the date of Sept. 30, 1846, with 

 credit to Dr. W. T. G. Morton, as the time when the 

 successful inhalation of the vapor of sulphuric ether 

 was fully established. The first operation under 

 ether in England was by Robert Listen, in Univer- 

 sity College Hospital, and on that occasion the 

 speaker was present. The use of chloroform and 

 its introduction by Sir James Y. Simpson was al- 

 luded to. Concerning their relative safety, he said : 

 " For my own part I believe that chloroform, if care- 

 fully administered on right principles, is on the 

 average the safer agent of the two." His next illus- 

 tration was from the work on fermentation by Pas- 

 teur. He said : " Pasteur's labors on fermentation 

 have had an important influence upon surgery. If 

 a wound could be treated with some substance that 

 would, without doing too serious mischief to the 

 human tissues, kill the microbes already contained 

 in it, and prevent the access of others in the living 

 state, putrefaction might be prevented, however 

 freely the air with its oxygen might enter." He 

 described his early use of carbolic acid for this pur- 

 pose, and expressed his belief " as a matter of long 

 experience that carbolic acid, by virtue of its power- 

 ful affinity for the epidermis and oily matters asso- 

 ciated with it, and also its great penetrating power, 

 is still the best agent at our disposal for purifying 

 the skin around the wound." The antiseptic method 

 was then discussed, and he showed how that system 

 had led to the great suppression of gangrene, pyae- 

 mia, and erysipelas in hospitals. But it was not 

 only in removing the unhealthfulness of hospitals 

 that the antiseptic system showed its benefits. In- 

 flammation being suppressed, with attendant pain, 

 fever, and wasting discharge, the sufferings of the 

 patient were of course immensely diminished : rapid 

 primary union being now the "rule, convalescence 

 was correspondingly curtailed ; while as regards 

 safety and the essential nature of the mode of repair, 

 it became a matter of indifference whether the 

 wound had clean-cut surfaces which could be closely 

 approximated or the injury had been such as to 

 cause destruction of tissue. And operations that 

 had been regarded from time immemorial as un- 

 justifiable were adopted with complete safety. 



The striking results of the application "of the 

 germ theory to surgery acted as a powerful stimu- 

 lus to the investigation of the nature of the micro- 

 organisms concerned; and it soon appeared that 

 putrefaction was by no means the only evil of mi- 

 crobic origin to which wounds are liable. The 

 bacillus of influenza is the latest discovery in this 

 direction. The work of Robert Koch was men- 

 tioned as "the most important discovery ever made 

 in pathology, because it revealed the true nature of 

 the disease ihat causes more sickness and death in 

 the human race than any other. It was he who dis- 



covered the bacillus of tubercle, and later the mi- 

 crobe of cholera. Bacteriologists are now univer- 

 sally agreed that, although various other conditions 

 are necessary to the production of an attack of 

 cholera, besides the mere presence of vibrio, yet it 

 is the essential matti-ir* inorbi ; and it is by the 

 aid of the diagnosis which its presence in any case 

 of true cholera enables the bacteriologist to make 

 that threatened invasions of this awful disease have 

 of late years been so successfully repelled from our 

 shores." 



Some earlier work of Pasteur's was then consid- 

 ered, and his application of preventive inocula- 

 tions in fowl cholera was described. Other diseases 

 that could be cured by inoculation were referred to, 

 including Pasteur's crowning triumph of his treat- 

 ment by this method of hydrophobia. 



Koch's work on tuberculin was then considered, 

 and the still more recent discovery of antitoxine. 

 In conclusion he discussed the more recent discov- 

 eries made by pathologists in regard to white cor- 

 puscles, and especially referred to the brilliant work 

 of the Russian Metclmikoff. who has shown that 

 the microbes of infective diseases when taken into 

 the blood are subject to the process of devouring 

 and digestion that is carried on both by the white 

 corpuscles and by cells that line the blood vessels. 



Proceedings of the Sections. A. Mathrmntirs 

 (in// /'hi/file*. This section was presided over by 

 Prof. Joseph J. Thomson, Professor of Experimental 

 Physics at Cambridge. In opening, Prof. Thomson 

 recalled the fact that when the British Association 

 last met in Liverpool, a quarter of a century ago, 

 the presiding officer of Section A had been Clerk- 

 Maxwell. Of the important advances made since 

 then in that branch of science, those in the electro- 

 magnetic field were the most conspicuous. Max- 

 well's theory in the hands of Hertz and others has 

 led to the discovery of whole regions of phenomena 

 previously undreamed of. During the past year 

 the jubilee of Lord Kelvin's tenure of the chair of 

 Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow 

 occurred, and the speaker referred to the event and 

 also spoke of the losses caused by the deaths of Sir 

 W. R. Grove and of Prof. Stoletow, of Moscow. 

 Concerning the teaching of physics at our universi- 

 ties, there is perhaps a tendency to make the course 

 too complex and too complete. Any investigation 

 in experimental physics requires a large expendi- 

 ture of both time and patience, hence the preserva- 

 tion of youthful enthusiasms is one of the most 

 important for consideration in the training of phys- 

 icists. The discovery by Rontgen of a new kind of 

 radiation from a highly exhausted tube, through 

 which an electric 1 discharge is passing, was dis- 

 cussed, and then Rontgen's later discovery that the 

 region around the discharge tube is traversed by 

 rays that can affect a photographic plate after pass- 

 ing through substances that are opaque to ordinary 

 light was treated at length, and he concluded with 

 the opinion that if the Rontgen rays are light rays 

 their wave lengths are of an entirely different order 

 from those of visible light. The final portion of the 

 address had to do with the question of the move- 

 ment of the ether and the recent experimental work 

 of Prof. Lodge and of Prof. Threlfall, undertaken 

 for the purpose of detecting a movement of ether 

 in the neighborhood of a vacuum tube entering 

 Rontgen rays. The results of the experiments were 

 negative, and the opinion was expressed that "un- 

 less the ether is immovable under the mechanical 

 forces in a varying electro-magnetic field, there are 

 a multitude of phenomena awaiting discovery." 



This section, owing to the large number of pa- 

 pers presented before it, divided itself at times into 

 subsections, as follows : On mathematics, on meteor- 

 ology, and on optics. 



