680 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVIII. No. 465. 



the stiipendous work of Lavoisier had 

 founded modern chemistry. The cell 

 theory was from the first not only morpho- 

 logical but physiological. It meant for the 

 application of chemistry to biology that 

 the chemistry of the body or of one of its 

 organs was a chemistry resultant from a 

 thousand tiny living fuimaees, individual 

 seats of oxidation, deoxidation, polymeriza- 

 tion, hydrolysis and what not. 



Not only that, but the living laboratory 

 of the cell itself manufactures even the 

 medium in which the cells themselves exist : 

 the saps and juices of the body. And we 

 are beginning to know, thanks to pathol- 

 ogy, that every species of animal produces 

 an internal medium specific to itself. Fur- 

 ther, your distinguished physiologist here, 

 Professor Macallum, who has so revealed 

 the distribution of the chemical elements 

 within the cell, tells us that the internal 

 mediiun which the cells of even the highest 

 animal forms produce as appropriate for 

 themselves, still approximates in its salts 

 to the water of the ancient geologic seas 

 in which their ancestry arose, and still re- 

 veals in fact the composition of that ancient 

 ocean. In that respect these living cells, 

 with all their influx of change, have been 

 more durable and constant even than ocean 

 itself. The contrast brings home to us a 

 deep distinction between dead matter and 

 living — the latter a moving equilibrium, 

 gaining stability from the very motion of 

 itself. 



By Schwann and by Pasteur the bonds 

 between chemistry and medicine were 

 draAvn still tighter through discoveries con- 

 cerning those subtle influences named 'fer- 

 ments.' Pathology, the study of these 

 processes of the body in disease, even more 

 than physiology, as yet, has drawn help 

 from this part of modern chemistry. If 

 the processes of health are in fact the re- 

 sultant of the due cooperation of ten mil- 

 lion little foci of healthy chemical action 



in the bod}', the processes of disease are 

 similarly divisible, and have to be traced 

 to the unhealthiness of certain of these 

 minute centers of activity. How extreme 

 is the importance of chemistry to modern 

 medicine, no single statement can perhaps 

 emphasize so well as this— that is, I believe, 

 acknowledged on all hands— that in virtue 

 of his chemistry, a chemist, Louis Pasteur, 

 during the latter half of last century, was 

 able to do more to alleviate the diseases of 

 mankind and animals than any physician 

 of his time. 



To the physicist also medicine has made 

 appeal. Prom him she has got under- 

 standing of the body's heat, the basis of 

 'the knowledge of fever; she has learned 

 the intricacies of the mechanism of the eye 

 and refined methods of examining that or- 

 gan and of remedying many of its defects ; 

 the laws that govern the circulation of 

 the blood and the subtlest means of detect- 

 ing the forces liberated in the working of 

 the nervous system. In some cases, as sci- 

 ences grow, their discoveries seem to sun- 

 der them the further one from another. In 

 my belief, that merely shows they are then 

 at the outset of their career. To-day we 

 find physics and chemistry converging and 

 conjoining within a field of physical chem- 

 istry. It early became convenient to have 

 a specific name for living material, wher- 

 ever found. The name given was proto- 

 plasm. It might have been better to call 

 it X or y, so far was it in many respects an 

 unknown quantity. Instead of looking 

 forward upon this material as a chemical 

 entity, we incline now to regard it rather 

 as a field for chemical action satisfying 

 certain particular conditions. Probably 

 discoveries regarding these conditions will 

 fall to the physical chemist, perhaps in 

 a future very near at hand. Probably 

 such discoveries will be among the most 

 valuable that medicine has yet received 

 from any source. 



