MEDICAL SCIENCE

Hokitika Guardian, 8 January 1930, Page 7

MEDICAL SCIENCE

CHANGES IN METHOD' OVERDUE

LONDON, November 20

The fifth <tui Norman Lockyer let-lure- in connection with the British A ieiKO Guild was delivered yesterday oy Sir Waiter Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Research Council. The title of the lecture was “Medical Research: the Tree and the Fruit.”

After reviewing the history of medivine from its beginnings in Hellenic culture, Sir Walter Fletcher declared mat tiio last four decades had seen the L.ov’e.lop'ment of knowledge in the sc.icuv.es contributing to medicine that nad no parallel in earlier history. So rapid was this development that the universities had been embarrassed to make provision for expanding scientific activity. 'I he medical student of today was presented with a body of facts two or three times as great as that i.ith which the student of the year ICOO had been compelled to deal. To meet this state of affairs radical changes in method and scope were required and were overdue.

It was d fib ult, the lecturer said, to imagine that surgery had any further aoVance of a major kind to make. We had seen the zenith of surgery in the word’s history, except in so far as it must remain to deal with wounds and accidental injuries. Every step forward in medical science was a step towards the aboliwon of surgery. On the other hand throughout the modern period the initiative as regards new methods passed away from the physician to the s: iciitifie worker in the experimental laboratory. Sir Walker instanced salvarsan emetine, a new synhotic compound resembling quinine, adrenalin, insulin, vaccines, immune sera, and vita-mines. The public, lie said, first saw new remedies in the hands of the physician it saw little of the workers from whose labours the advance had come or of the patient, skilled, and many-sided efforts that had contributed to its coming. It saw the fruit, hut not the tree. “it is a commonplace,” Sir Walter Fletcher said, “to complain that a common cold can he neither prevented nor cured. Every human child obtains its first lesson about the state of medicine by discovering that, as each infections disease comes in its turn the doctor has no magic beyond that of giving rest and warmth in bed. The general case-mortality rate for grave infections like those of pneumonia or puerperal fever has remained almost stationary for many years. The cause of acute rheumatism in children with its pitiful tale of subsequent heart disease is still unknown to us. Every schoolboy knows the romance .of the discoveries of the causation of malaria and its mode of transmission; he has learned in his geograhpy lesson of the triumphant control of malaria and yellow fqver that allowed the construction of the Panama Canal. But even in this region of tropical disease the layman sees that something is wrong and that our present knowledge does not allow us to press. forward to final success. Yellow fever is still entrenched in West Africa, where it broods as a continual menace to the rest of the tropical world, its potential dangers being greatly increased by the modern possibilities of rapid transport. As to malaria, we have to admit that there are probably more rather than fewer sufferers in the world as a whole, though over thirty years have passed since Ross, under Manson’s direction, proved its insect transmission.. We know enough to ireo a limited area from, the disease if enough money be spent. Much more knowledge is required before we can hope for wider success in a general campaign. A hundred million sufferers in India alone must wait for relief until some generations of betterment have been traversed or until some increase in our Knowledge brings, as we have every right to hope, some new kind of power.”

Turning to methods of improvement, Sir Walter said that it was only in the universities that the ablest young brains would be caught for the service. But they must be given reasonable remuneration. Not only fairness but enlightened self-interest should provoke any nation to bring the pay of competent research workers to such a level that they might hope in middle life at last to be able to bring an education as good as their own within the reach of their children. Until that was done we were, in practice, ensuring the sterility of those who, almost by definition, must be counted among the most desirable begetters of our future stock.

Sir Walter Fletcher instanced India as an example of the present-day attitude to scientific research. “India,” he said, “is a country whose primaryneeds lies patiently in the realities of agriculture, of .medicine in the widest possible- sense, and of education in the primary human arts, of which those of literature -should not stand first. Yet upon the Viceroy’s Council a council not of representative Ministers but of technical experts, those primary subjects of agriculture, health and education are represented always by a layman having no first-hand knowledge of any branch of science or of its methods. The Army is represented by a professional soldier the law by n professional lawyer, commerce and finance each by a trained expert, and yet in the inevitable rivalry among competing interests in Government policy the only voice speaking for all the most primary natural needs of India has always been that of a man universal altogether in the realities o' the .scientific life of the technicalities 01 natural knowledge.”

lie added: ‘the problem of gaining