CHAPTER V 



THE DOMINANCE OF THE NUCLEUS 1 

 (1906) 



There are, it seems to me, two alternative reasons which should 

 govern the choice of a topic for discussion at the meetings of 

 Sections of the British Medical Association : either to afford to 

 the general medical public an expression of opinion by specialists 

 upon topics of the time, or, on the other hand, to direct the 

 attention of the public to matters in which it is well that they 

 should be interested. These discussions are not merely for the 

 benefit of the participants ; they are published in extenso in 

 what has become the organ of the British practitioner throughout 

 the world ; and this public aspect must be kept in sight, nor 

 should the debate be allowed to narrow itself into the discussion 

 of minutiae. 



It must be frankly admitted that nuclear function is not 

 exactly a burning question of the day. Your ordinary medical 

 man is little concerned about it ; your routine physiologist is 

 concerned in the main with mass effects ; your pathologist sees, 

 it is true, certain changes in the nucleus in various conditions of 

 cell disturbance, but what these changes indicate are scarcely 

 discussed in his text-books or journals. It is for the second of 

 the above-mentioned reasons that this topic has been chosen for 

 to-day's discussion. Though we have not what has become a 

 topic of the time, we have a matter which it is timely to bring 

 forward. 



For years individual observers in zoology and botany, cyto- 



1 Being the opening address of a discussion on the Physiology and Patho- 

 logy of the Nucleus at the 74th Annual Meeting of the British Medical Associa- 

 tion, Toronto, August 1906. 



188 



