26 



Memorial Number. 



national scientific or clinical societies and in all of them it may be 

 said he was prepared to take his part as an expert in the reading 

 and the discussion of technical papers. 



He served as president of the American Physiological Society, 

 the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, the American 

 Gastro-enterological Society, the American Society for the Ad- 

 vancement of Clinical Research, the Association of American 

 Physicians and the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. 

 The membership in these societies is composed of trained spe- 

 cialists. It is their custom to choose as their presiding officer 

 only those who have made contributions of distinction to the 

 subject to which the society is devoted. It seems to me unique 

 in the modern history of medicine for one man to have received 

 such special recognition from technical workers in so many different 

 fields. 



While his activities covered this large range he was interested 

 primarily in physiology. " I belong," he said in a recent paper " to 

 those who believe . . . that the knowledge of physiology is of 

 special importance to clinical medicine." His work in this field 

 entitles him certainly to be ranked among the foremost American 

 physiologists. In attempting to present some estimate of the 

 results of his labors I must limit myself mainly to his physiological 

 activity. Indeed in this subject alone his papers are so varied 

 that it will be possible to bring under review only what seem to 

 be his major contributions. His first appearance as an investi- 

 gator is recorded in a brief note in the Proceedings of the Berlin 

 Physiological Society, May 14, 1880. In this note it is stated 

 that Professor Kronecker exhibited a dog in which Herr Cand 

 Med. Meltzer had cut the nerves going to the mylohyoid muscle 

 and thus demonstrated the importance of this muscle in the 

 initial stage of swallowing. At a later meeting of the society 

 in the same year Kronecker presented the full results of an in- 

 vestigation carried out by Herr Cand. Med. Meltzer under his 

 supervision on the "Process of Swallowing." This paper was 

 published subsequently by Kronecker and Meltzer in the Monats- 

 bericht der Konigl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1881. 

 In this important contribution the mechanism of swallowing was 

 given an entirely new interpretation which has since been generally 



