—_ 
ADDRESS 
BY 
Se JOouPH LISTHR, Bazt.,..D.C.L., OL.D., P.BS., 
PRESIDENT. 
My Lord Mayor, my Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, I have first to 
_ express my deep sense of gratitude for the great honour conferred upon 
me by my election to the high office which I occupy to-day. It came 
upon me as a great surprise. The engrossing claims of surgery have 
prevented me for many years from attending the meetings of the 
Association, which excludes from her sections medicine in all its 
branches. This severance of the art of healing from the work of the 
Association was right and indeed inevitable. Not that medicine has 
little in common with science. The surgeon never performs an operation 
without the aid of anatomy and physiology; and in what is often the 
most difficult part of his duty, the selection of the right course to follow, 
he, like the physician, is guided by pathology, the science of the nature 
of disease, which, though very difficult from the complexity of its subject 
matter, has made during the last half-century astonishing progress ; so 
that the practice of medicine in every department is becoming more 
and more based on science as distinguished from empiricism. I propose 
on the present occasion to bring before you some illustrations of the 
interdependence of science and the healing art ; and the first that I will 
take is perhaps the most astonishing of all results of purely physical 
inquiry—the discovery of the Réntgen rays, so called after the man who 
first clearly revealed them to the world. Mysterious as they still are, 
there is one of their properties which we can all appreciate—their power 
of passing through substances opaque to ordinary light. There seems to 
be no relation whatever between transparency in the common sense of 
BQ 
