540 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION 1. 
any profession. By definition, our science studies the laws of health and the 
functions of the healthy body, therefore it is ours to lead in the quest for health. 
Is this object best achieved if we confine ourselves to research in our labora- 
tories, and to the teaching of the principles of physiology to medical students, 
while we leave the community as a whole uninstructed as to the objects of our 
research and its value to every man, and trust the medical students whom we 
turn out to communicate, or not communicate as they choose, the results 
of their training and our research to the world at large? 
There is little question that much of the ignorance abroad in the world, 
and much of the fatuous opposition to our experimental work and research, arise 
from this aloofness of ours. Here also lies the cause of much of the latent 
period in the application of acquired knowledge to great sociological problems, 
and the presence of untold sickness and death which could be easily prevented 
if only a scientific system of dealing with disease could be evolved. 
The position occupied by scientists in medicine at the present day is largely 
that of schoolmasters to a medical guild, and even at that, one constructed upon 
lines which have grown antiquated by the progress of medical science. It ought 
now to become the function of the scientist to re-model the whole system so as 
to fight disease at its source. The whole situation at the moment calls out 
for such a movement. On the one hand, there exists a widespread interest on 
the part of an awakened community in health questions, evidenced by recent 
legislation dealing with the health of school-children, with the health of the 
worker, with the sanitary condition of workshops, with the questions of 
maternity and infant mortality, and with the communication of infectious 
diseases. On the other hand, there is chaos in the medical organisation to meet 
all these new demands, and the ample means recently placed at the command of 
the nation and of municipal authorities are being largely wasted by overlapping 
and misdirection for lack of skilled leadership. Surely it is a time when those 
who have laid the scientific foundations for the new advances should take 
counsel together, assume some generalship, and show how the combat is to be 
waged, not as a guerilla warfare, but as an organised and co-ordinated campaign. 
There are two essentials in the inception of this organised campaign against 
disease on a scientific basis. The first is to demonstrate clearly to the public 
mind that modern scientific medicine arose from the experimental or research 
method, that it was only when experimental observation of the laws of health 
and disease, in animals and man, commenced on an organised and broadcast 
basis that medicine and surgery leaped forward and the remarkable achieve- 
ments of the past fifty years began. Also that it is only by the organisation 
and endowment of medical research that future discovery and advancement 
are possible. ‘The second essential is to convince the public that a national 
system must be evolved placing medical science and medical practice in co- 
ordination, so that the discoveries of science may be adequately applied in an 
organised scheme for the prevention and treatment of disease. The method in 
which discoveries have been made in the past suggests an amplification and 
organisation along similar lines for the future, and the banishment of many 
diseases by public health work in the past suggests that it is more efficiently 
organised and wide-spread public health work in the future, extended from the 
physical environment to the infecting individual, that will be most fruitful in 
banishing other diseases. 
If it be queried by anyone here, what has physiology to do with disease, it 
may be replied that the question comes at least fifty years too late. The 
methods evolved first by physiologists in experimentation upon animals have 
become the methods of all the exact sciences in medicine. Bacteriology is the 
physiology of the bacterium, and the study of protozoan diseases the physiology 
of certain groups of protozoa. Ongano-therapy had its origin in physiology, and 
many of its most brilliant discoveries were made by physiologists, and all by 
scientists who used physiological methods. Serum therapy, experimental 
pharmacology, and the great problems of immunity all arose from the labonrs 
of men with expert training in physiology who branched out into practical 
applications achieved by the extension of the experimental, or research, method. 
The modern methods of medical diagnosis and the brilliant technique of con- 
temporary surgery, what has opened the door to these but the experimental 
