THE AIMS AND BOUNDARIES OF 
PHYSIOLOGY. 
ADDRESS TO SECTION I (PHYSIOLOGY) BY 
Siz WALTER M. FLETCHER, K.B.E., M.D., Sce.D., F.B.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Upon the occasion of our meeting in this metropolitan city of Edin- 
burgh, the seat of an ancient university and a great centre of medical 
study and practice, it has occurred to me that it may be profitable 
for us to consider the part which physiology should rightly take in 
its relation to national life, to learning, and to medicine. Not only 
the place of our meeting, indeed, but some special circumstances of 
the present time seem to make it fitting that we should here review 
the progress, the proper scope, and the prospects of our chosen subject, 
We are now just half a century from the time when physiology first 
came to take its present position in this kingdom as one of the great 
branches of university learning and as a vital part of medical educa- 
tion. We have seen the close of a War which, though it diverted 
and distorted the progress of the science, yet brought it great oppor- 
tunities of service in national life and taught us lessons, here as in 
so many other directions, of which we shall do well to take profit. 
The passing of the War, moreover, has brought a period of change 
and unrest during which impulses towards reform are being chequered 
by the results of fatigue or reaction. Both here and in America it 
may be said that, while physiology has come from the War with 
enlarged outlook and responsibilities, it is exposed to some new and 
perhaps dangerous influences in the present time of rapid resettlement. 
It may well be worth while, then, to look now both forward and back, 
to see the road by which we have hitherto been led and its relations 
to that which now lies before us. 
TE: 
Physiology, as the passing generation has known it, took shape 
and established its boundaries in this country just fifty years ago, 
when, shaking off its long subordination to anatomy, it was brought 
to a new life of recognition and progress. The seventeenth century 
had seen England famous for her school of physiologists, leading the 
rest of the Continent in experimental results and in new ideas. Working 
upon the foundations laid by Harvey, that brilliant group at Oxford— 
Boyle, Lower, Mayow, Willis—had brought new light to the study 
of the living body. Nor was their service only recognised by fellow- 
workers abroad or by those that came after. Their names and fame 
were on fashionable lips; like that of their predecessor, Harvey himself, 
under Charles J., and of that other Cambridge philosopher, Glisson, 
