182 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
At home the bodies of the civilian population were exposed to many 
stresses, often hardly less than those of active service. Men and women 
alike were exposed to arduous toil, to dangerous occupation, to poisons 
of many kinds needed for munitions, and in all these dangers the 
guidance of the physiologist was needed for the avoidance of industrial 
fatigue and loss of output and for devising protection against industrial 
poisoning. The whole nation was threatened by the menace of starva- 
tion, and our escape from that, itself one of the governing conditions 
of our ultimate victory, was due to a system of rationing and of the 
management of food materials, animal and vegetable, which was based 
on accurate physiological knowledge, won by experimental methods. 
I touch on these points here briefly and in outline only in order 
to draw attention to the special influence which, as I think, the War 
has exercised upon the position of physiology in this country. The 
physiologists gave no exceptional help to the nation during the War; 
the exponents of every branch of science were needed, were ready, and 
were used, in our national crisis. Hardly one division of science can 
be named the deficiency of which would not have made defeat inevitable. 
It is a truism and a commonplace to say that no bravery and no fortitude 
could have avoided defeat without the help of scientific men and of 
the fruits of experimental science, though that commonplace has not, 
I think, ever yet been enshrined in the addresses or thanks of Parlia- 
ment or in the prayers and thanksgivings of our churches. But we 
may recognise, perhaps, that the nation as a whole, and those especially 
who have the government, public or private, of large groups of men 
in their hands, have learned that obedience to physiological law is a 
first necessity for the maintenance of the body machinery in health 
and for its effective and harmonious use. They have come to know, 
moreover, that the men who alone can guide them to this obedience 
are those who have learned in the school of investigation from Nature 
herself. The nation has seen a Minister fall whose control of the 
people’s food was not based upon physiological law, and his successor, 
whose adoption of the teaching of physiological experiment was early 
and faithful, gain renown. Nor was this by any means an isolated object- 
lesson. There is no doubt, surely, that physiologists have a new 
vista before them of immense public usefulness, if they will hold them- 
selves in readiness to give the same kind of service to the country in 
the stress of her industrial life during peace as they gave so freely 
and to such effect in time of war. 
But if the War brought these lessons to the general public, what 
lessons have come from it to the physiologist himself? I would only 
recall briefly here the considerations which were brought home 
with sufficient clearness to us all, I think, during and after the closing 
stages of the struggle. The War, in the first place, displayed before 
us new and gigantic fields of physiological study. Viewing these so 
far as we can, even at this distance, dispassionately, we see 
how the stresses and accidents of warfare in all their variety offered 
to our study a_ series of experiments made upon the human 
body, and on a gigantic scale. - Only by disciplined study of 
the results at all stages of these trials of war in all their varying 
——— se 
