I.—PHYSIOLOGY., 133 
degrees of horror and distress could effective aid be given in palliation 
of suffering or its avoidance. It was inevitable that study of this 
_ kind and upon so great a scale should result—as, happily, it did result— 
in much permanent gain to physiological knowledge and to the bene- 
- ficent power that all sound knowledge brings. New insight was given 
into the functional patterns of the nervous system and into the orderly 
hierarchies, so to speak, under which this or that function is brought 
into subordination to another of superior rank, and new knowledge 
was gained of the phenomena of separation and. repair in the outlying 
-nerye-trunks. Accurate information was collected of the nutritional 
needs, quantitative or qualitative, of human beings under varying con- 
ditions ; and, in particular, many special conditions of warfare brought 
to the test, established the fundamental usefulness, and stimulated 
_the growth of that newest chapter in physiology already mentioned— 
_ that dealing with the elusive but potent accessory factors in nutrition— 
“the vitamins. These examples must suffice where scores of others 
familiar to all of you might be given. 
In the second place, the experience of the War has had wholesome 
effect from its tendency to remove the barriers that here and there 
had grown up between physiologists and the practical needs of medicine. 
Physiologists had valued, and justly valued, their academic freedom 
of inquiry within the universities, and, indeed, we know that practical 
utility could not be better served in the long run than by the detached 
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But, partly for reasons of 
hospital and professional organisation already touched upon, and partly 
because, to its obvious and immense gain, physiology had attracted 
from other paths men who were not, and had never become, medical 
men, there were some capital parts of the subject of which the chief 
explorers had never used the medical field of work or brought to 
“Medicine the weapons they had, perhaps unwittingly, at command. 
4 We can recognise already that this partial divorce has been changed 
by the War into a union likely to be increasingly fertile. Of the 
professorial chairs of medicine or directorships of medical units 
established since the War, for the advance of medical knowledge within 
hospitals in accordance with the university standards and ideals 
acknowledged in other subjects of study, it is remarkable that to the 
"greater number of these there have already been appointed men whose 
training has been in the methods of the physiological laboratory, and 
who applied that training to urgent medical problems of the War. 
‘There is hardly any one of our “schools of physiology, moreover, to 
which some piece of living experience has not been brought in these 
‘last years to enforce the old lesson of the value to science itself of 
bringing natural knowledge to its fullest utilitarian applications. The 
practical fruits of scientific labour are found, if our hands are put out 
to gather them, to contain within themselves, like the natural fruits 
of the earth, the very seeds from which new knowledge and new fertility 
will spring. Many of our leaders in physiology brought to the problems 
‘of war the accumulated knowledge of their lives, as patriotism and 
humanity dissolved at a touch the hedges of custom and use. I know 
of not one such who did not find in the application of his vision and 
