THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 7 



consequences of our dense population — the pollution of our rivers anrl 

 estuaries, and a method has been found whereby great supplies of shell- 

 fish that had been condemned are once more available as food. Some of 

 my hearers will know, too, of the remarkable results obtained from the 

 scientific study of the habits of the salmon. Though fishing has been 

 described as ' a fool at one end of a string and a worm at the other,' the 

 subject is not without its personal interest, I believe, to many learned 

 men. 



Reverting to the historical sequence, it is appropriate to recall, with 

 gratitude for its labours, the constitution of the Medical Research Com- 

 mittee in 1913, under the Insurance Act of 1911 : this has since (in 1919) 

 been transferred to a committee of the Privy Council under the name of 

 the Medical Research Council, and its funds are directly voted by Parlia- 

 ment instead of being drawn from the contributions made by or on behalf 

 of insured persons. 



Research alone could provide the knowledge on which must be based 

 all wise and effective legislation or administrative action in the interests 

 of the nation's health. Yet until 1913 the State had played at best a 

 subsidiary part in the organisation of such research and the provision of 

 its material support. Under the new conditions the State is actively 

 concerned with the promotion and co-ordination of medical research 

 towards conquest of those infirmities with which ignorance has afflicted 

 humanity. A few only may be mentioned, which have rightly appealed 

 to wide public interest. Insulin, a gift to science and to humanity from 

 young enterprise and enthusiasm in the Dominion of Canada, is not only 

 saving lives that were threatened, and restoring almost to normal health 

 and enjoyment many that were crijipled by weakness and restriction, but, 

 as a tool of investigation, is shaping new knowledge that will influence all 

 our ideas of the functions of the body, in health or disease. The dis- 

 covery of the vitamins, those still mysterious and minute constituents of 

 a natural diet, has brought understanding of various defects of health and 

 of develoj)ment, created for us largely by the blindness of civilisation to 

 dangers accompanying its progress, dangers which science can avert. 

 Closely linked with the discovery has been the more recent development of 

 knowledge concerning the need of sunlight for health, in man and his 

 fellow animals as in plants. We know now that crippling deformity 

 appears in the growing child unless he receives his proper share of the 

 vitalising rays of the sun, either directly or through the presence in natural 

 foods of vitamins which these rays have produced. Sunlight, or its 



