286 



NATURE 



[May 6, 1920 



have hitherto been at its disposal. The question 

 arises, therefore, whether help from some public 

 source may not reasonably be expected. There 

 is doubtless a very general popular feeling that 

 ordinary scientific research is as much a recreative 

 amusement to its devotees as are games and sport 

 to the majority, and that those who indulge their 

 whims should bear the additional cost like any 

 other section of the community. But it must not 

 be forgotten that there are various degrees of 

 games and sports suited to the several means of 

 those who pursue them, whereas ability and 

 inclination to make and record scientific dis- 

 coveries are in no way proportional to the 

 resources of those who possess them. It must 

 also be emphatically maintained that there is no 

 basis for such a comparison. Science is undoubt- 

 edly an absorbing source of gratification to those 

 who study its problems ; but even the most 

 abstract research, however far removed from the 

 affairs of everyday life, is an asset of which no 

 man can estimate the value. 



In some directions the public has already become 

 accustomed to the scientific spirit. It has begun, 

 for example, to understand the value of pre- 

 ventive medicine. It no longer reserves its grati- 

 tude for those who discover remedies for disease; 

 it realises the still greater importance of the work 

 of those who try to learn the origin of disease and 

 the influence of the environment upon the exciting 

 cause. It should now be led to understand its 

 debt to those who make advances in this and 

 other branches of purely scientific work. The 

 germs of all material progress and comfort are 

 contained in our scientific serials and the publica- 

 tions of our scientific societies, and to allow a 

 limitation of their scope is a hindrance to the 

 public welfare. 



The Government has already aided a few of the 

 older and more important societies with a partial 

 or complete grant of premises, and it entrusts an 

 annual sum of money, given in the Estimates of 

 1920-21 as ii,oooL, to the Royal Society, to be 

 distributed for scientific investigations by a 

 committee appointed for that purpose, as well as 

 loooL annually towards the cost of scientific pub- 

 lications. It has also established the important 

 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 

 We would now urge that a further step should be 

 taken, and some direct endowment provided for 

 those purely scientific publications which have for 

 so many years been maintained by voluntary effort, 

 both to the honour of the country and to the 

 welfare of mankind. 



NO. 26^6. VOL. ioc:l 



Useful Physiology. 



Physiology and National Needs. Edited by Prof. 

 W. D. Halliburton. Pp. vii+162. (London: 

 Constable and Co., Ltd., 1919.) Price 8s. 6d. 

 net. 



PROF. HALLIBURTON and his fellow-lec- 

 turers have made out a good case for 

 physiology having done its bit in the great war. 

 The editor leads off with an account of the activi- 

 ties of the Royal Society and other committees in 

 food control in general, and gives more particular 

 details of the inquiries made in his own laboratory 

 on the value of margarines and fatty acids. Vita- 

 mines occupy the whole of Prof. Hopkins's dis- 

 course, and Prof. Harden returns to them again 

 with a summary of the work done on scurvy at 

 the Lister Institute. But Prof. Harden is surely 

 in error in saying that Lind held that scurvy was 

 caused by abstinence from fresh vegetable food. 

 That astute observer knew 150 years ago that 

 scurvy could be cured by fresh vegetables, but he 

 thought it was caused by living in confined, damp 

 quarters, arguing that no one would say that ague 

 was caused by abstinence from bark because it 

 could be cured by giving bark. 



Prof. Raton's essay on physiology in the study 

 of disease is much less satisfactory. He is under 

 a complete misapprehension of the aim and 

 objects of medicine — a mistake shared in part by 

 Prof. Halliburton — and medical men who read 

 his solemn castigation of their empirical methods 

 may not unreasonably retort that his discovery 

 that tetany is due to the liberation of guanidin, 

 controlled "somehow " by the parathyroids, has 

 left medicine just about where it was. Prof. 

 Paton seems to think that the object and business 

 of medicine is to study disease. The object of 

 medicine in reality is to prevent people feeling 

 ill, and to make those who do feel ill feel better, 

 and its success is to be measured by the product 

 of the degree of betterment and its duration. 

 " What the physician has to find out in every 

 case," he says, " is simply what has gone wrong, 

 and why it has gone wrong, before he attempts 

 to put it right." So that if I have a headache 

 and send for my physician, he is to engage with 

 the hitherto insoluble problem of the nature and 

 cause of the common megrinous headache (which 

 is one of the great causes of human inefficiency, 

 and no trivial matter) and solve it before he cures 

 me by exhibiting 10 grains of aspirin : it might be 

 good physiology, but it would be thoroughly bad 

 medicine. The "practical man" is of course 

 very wicked from our point of view, but he has 

 been belaboured pretty freely these last few years ; 

 and, after all, he does a lot of practical good in 



