32 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. SLIX. No. 1254 



the value of the work which lies in the great 

 field of effort resulting from the relations of 

 chemistry to medicine. For many years the 

 main subjects of his investigations were 

 enzymic action and problems of nutrition, re- 

 searches of equal interest and importance to 

 the progTess of medicine and to the advance- 

 ment of chemical knowledge. No less close 

 and vital were these relations iji the important 

 spheres of influence which Dr. Long had cre- 

 ated about himself outside of his laboratory, 

 as instanced by his service of twenty years on 

 the Illinois State Board of Health and by his 

 connection with the Council of Pharmacy and 

 Chemistry of the American Medical Associa- 

 tion from its inception in 1905 to the end of 

 his life. The same breadth of interest, sup- 

 ported by his great ability and fearless hon- 

 esty, led to his selection as a member of Dr. 

 Eemsen's famous referee board, and in the 

 last year of his life also to his election to the 

 presidency of the Institute of Medicine of 

 Chicago, which was founded in large measure 

 to further the cause of medicine through the 

 stimulation of research in all fields contrib- 

 uting to the advancement of medical knowl- 

 edge. 



Dr. Dains has discussed in an admirable 

 fashion the details of Professor Long's valu- 

 able contributions to science and to the cause 

 of humanity, and I have felt that I could pay 

 no truer tribute to the high aim's and achieve- 

 ments of my life-long colleague and friend 

 than by attempting to outline to-night some of 

 the important features of the relations be- 

 tween chemistry and medicine and thus help 

 to have the cause " carried on " which Dr. 

 Long so nobly served and had so greatly at 

 heart. 



From its earliest beginnings chemistry has 

 found in medicine one of its greatest sources 

 of inspiration — indeed, the very name of our 

 science refers to the dawn of chemical knowl- 

 edge in the temples of Egypt, the " land of 

 Chemi," where priests prepared simple reme- 

 dies and studied their chemical nature. This 

 close connection persisted through the cen- 

 turies and found perhaps its crowning cul- 

 mination in the persons of two modern giants 



of the medical world — the greater one, Louis 

 Pasteur, the chemist who turning to medicine 

 and using his chemical knowledge and its ex- 

 act criteria in its service, founded the knowl- 

 edge of disease through microscopic organisms, 

 the very foundation stone of modem medicine, 

 and the second, Paul Ehrlich, who inaugurated 

 the present most promising era of combatting 

 these dread causes of disease by the develop- 

 ment of specific remedies, produced artificially 

 in the chemical laboratory in the form of pure 

 chemical compounds. Between these two ex- 

 tremes, the cause of disease and its cure, chem- 

 istry has found such an infinite variety of 

 lines of effort contributing to medical knowl- 

 edge that I must necessarily limit my subject 

 and I shall do so by confining myself in large 

 measure to those phases of it with which I am 

 personally most familiar. How necessary such 

 a limitation must be is no better shown than 

 by the fact that at the present moment medical 

 science seems to be turning to chemistry more 

 and more as an essential factor in every one 

 of its fundamental branches. That chemistry 

 was essential in bio-chemistry and . in physi- 

 ology has long been well understood, but of 

 recent years pathology also has turned to 

 chemistry for the solution of its most im- 

 portant problems; the best preparation for a 

 bacteriologist, I am told, is long and advanced 

 training in chemistry; and even the great 

 science of zoology, so long held in thrall by the 

 obvious fact of form, has now turned to chem- 

 istry. How vital these applications of our 

 science are, has been impressed most insist- 

 ently perhaps on me by the the fact that some 

 biologists seem at length to have reached the 

 conclusion that those most important of all 

 factors in human life, in the very evolution 

 of our race, the factors included in the col- 

 lective name of heredity, must owe their won- 

 derful power of transmission of characters and 

 character in final instance to the chemical na- 

 ture, the specific chemical character, of chem- 

 ical molecules. 



With this glimi>se into the vast vistas of 

 present and future developments in the domain 

 of the relations of chemistry to medicine, I 

 must turn from these most alluring questions 



