MEDICINE AND EXPERIMENTAL 

 SCIENCE 



By F. GOWLAND HOPKINS, F.R.S. 



Professor of Biochemistry in the University 

 of Cambridge. 



During the early days of the war of 1870 the 

 surgeon Sedillot wrote as follows to the President 

 of the French Academy, "The horrible mortality 

 amongst the wounded in battle calls for the atten- 

 tion of all the friends of science and humanity. 

 The surgeon's art, hesitating and disconcerted, 

 pursues a doctrine whose rules seem to flee be- 

 fore research.... Places where there are wounded 

 are recognisable by the fetor of suppuration and 

 gangrene." Quoting this letter another French 

 writer adds that, as a matter of fact, "Hundreds 

 and thousands of wounded, their faces pale, but 

 full of hope and desire to live, succumbed between 

 the eighth and tenth day to gangrene and erysipelas. 

 Those failures of surgery of the past are plain to 

 us now that the doctrine of germs has explained 

 everything; but at that time such an avowal 

 of impotence before the mysterious contagium sui 

 generis which the doctors averred eluded all research, 



