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TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I.—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. H 
Section I1.—PHYSIOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION.—Professor BensAMIN Moore, M.A., 
iD Senele Rss: 
MELBOURNE. 
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
The Value of Research in the Development of National Health. 
Tun history of medical science presents to the curious student a remarkable 
development commencing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and one 
worthy of special study, both on account of the light that it sheds on the 
present position and the illumination it affords for future progress. 
If any text-book of medicine or treatise on any branch of medical science 
written before 1850 be taken up at random its pages will reveal that it differs but 
little from one written a full century earlier. If such a volume be compared 
with one written thirty-five years later, it will be found that the whole outlook 
and aspect of medicine have changed within a generation. 
Erroneous introspective dreams as to the nature of diseases, as ‘idiopathic’ 
as the many strange maladies which their authors are so fond of describing have 
been replaced by fast-proven facts, and medicine has passed from an occult craft 
into an exact science based upon experimental inquiry and logical deduction from 
observation. 
What caused this rapid spring of growth, after the long latent period ot 
centuries, and are we now reaching the end of the new era in medicine, or do 
fresh discoveries still await the patient experimentalist with a trained imagina- 
tion who knows both how to dream and how to test his dreams? 
Tt is but a crude comparison that represents the earlier age as one of 
empiricism and imagination, and the later period as one of induction and experi- 
ment. Empiricism has always been of high value in science, it will ever remain 
so, and some of the richest discoveries in science have arisen empirically. 
Imagination also is as essential to the highest scientific work to-day as it was 
a century ago, and throughout all time the work of the genius is characterised 
in all spheres of human endeavour by the breadth and flight of the imagination 
which it shows. The great scientist, whether he be a mathematician, a physicist, 
a chemist, or a physiologist, requires imagination to pierce forward into the 
unknown, just as truly as does the great poet or artist. Also, the inspired 
work of poet or painter must be concordant with a system of facts or conven- 
tions, and not outrage certain canons of his art, as certainly as the true and 
lasting work of the scientist must accurately accord with natural laws. 
The scientist is as little able to prove the fundamental truth or existence 
of the groundwork upon which modern physical, chemical, and physiological 
theories are built, as the artist is to prove the ethics, or perfect truth, or perfect 
beauty, of those conventions upon which poetry, painting, or that great group 
of studies termed the ‘humanities’ find their basis. But the artist or 
philosopher knows that, using these conventions as the best at present discovered, 
