Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/19

Rh relish in the general menu. Now I am told that morbid anatomy is much less in evidence—we have left all that behind, and discussions of the intricate problems that are behind it occupy the attention of our members. Whereas we used to display disease in the gross, the results of disease that is, we are now able to recognize finer changes and more minute evidences of bioplasmic unrest that are behind these results, and they are the goal that we make for now. I say that these results must long ago have been suspected. I remember in the early days of ovariotomy making the observation that those who succumbed thereto were mostly those who had suffered from hæmorrhage into the parts concerned especially, of course, into the peritoneal cavity. And examining the blood extravasated under these circumstances, one could see it peopled with countless hosts of minute bodies, that the bacteriologist is now in some measure able to name and to classify. It was evident even in the rude experiments of those days that blood was a favourable soil for their production, and one even had a suspicion that intensive cultivation lay there, but failed to detect its presence.

And pathology still is shifting! We have not yet reached finality. Even bacteria are probably results and not causes; they strive or cancel with one another to ulterior ends, and we are gliding on in advance of the most painstaking morbid anatomy.

As I have just now suggested for cancer, look how near the chemist and biologist have come. I struck a hybrid the other day—a biochemist! In devoting himself more and more to the minutest germs and particles of protoplasm, the biologist is not far off the investigation of gases, and the