166 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



' Might not the time and resources spent on chemo-therapeutic research 

 be diverted more profitably to the study of chemical and physical 

 mechanism ? ' The same attitude is reflected in the awards of Fellow- 

 ships and Scholarships for Medical Eesearch. Formerly all the recipients 

 were primarily biologists with a medical training : now a medico-biological 

 training is unusual. Physiology in the broad sense in which it was used 

 by Claude Bernard and Huxley has given place to a new physiology of 

 physico-chemical reactions : I might go beyond this and say that phy- 

 siology is getting further and further from practical medicine, and this is 

 the more regrettable as most of the Chairs in Physiology are connected 

 with the Medical Schools and because the science of treatment is largely 

 dependent on experimental physiology. Prof. J. S. Haldane clearly had 

 this in mind in 1923 when he wrote : ' We may say without serious 

 misrepresentation that the official present-day view of physiologists 

 is that physiology . . . aims at investigating the physics and chemistry 

 of life, and might properly be called biophysics and biochemistry.' 



Biology has lost ground as an educational subject in the last twenty 

 years ; yet few, if any, sciences cultivate the powers of observation to 

 the same degree. Universities, like London, in which biology was once 

 compulsory for all undergraduates reading science, have now made it 

 an optional subject for science degrees ; so that it is not surprising to 

 find not only the general public but men who have had a scientific 

 training living in complete ignorance of the elementary laws which 

 govern animal life, including their own. Can it be wondered at that we, 

 as a nation, are the prey of the charlatan and food vendor ? Ought not 

 all educated people to know enough of biology to understand something 

 of its methods and to have grasped its fundamental truths, if it be but to 

 protect themselves ? In our education and culture in this respect we fall 

 short of many European coimtries and of America. 



No branch of experimental biology has received less consideration in 

 Great Britain than that of pharmacology : it is also the most neglected 

 branch of medicine, and although the object of medicine is the healing of 

 the sick, it is amazing that medical schools in Britain, often equipped 

 with all other modern laboratories, lack departments of therapeutics. 

 I was once asked at a meeting, by a leading medical man, what has 

 pharmacology ever done ? The answer is, of course, that it has formu- 

 lated and brought reason and knowledge into treatment of the sick ; so 

 much did it impress that great pathologist, Ehrlich, that he left his sera 

 and turned his attention to drugs, and with the unlimited resources at 

 his disposal gave the world, amongst other drugs, salvarsan : so much did 

 it impress the brilliant French chemist, M. Fourneau, that he has confined 

 his studies to those of drugs, a study which has resulted in the synthesis 

 of many valuable arsenical compounds and dyes. In America many 

 centres, including the Rockefeller Institute, have turned to the study of 

 drugs ; and Italian pharmacology is doing the same. 



I have heard it said by a leading official of our Ministry of Health, 

 speaking to panel practitioners, that they, in the Ministry, do not want 

 stereotyped prescribing in treatment. Surely there was never such 

 nonsense. If there is a best treatment, let us have it whether it is stereo- 

 typed or not. In this respect the British Medical Association has given 



