Better a commitment to health and research than to missiles.

Abstract

I wish first to thank the association for the honour that you do to me, and to the Medical Research Council whom I serve, in electing me as your president during the forthcoming year. Honour may be, as John Dryden put it, empty bubble. Pleasure, however, is something else and it is for me a particular pleasure to be elected as your president on this occasion for we are meeting in Yorkshire, the loveliest of English counties. There are Yorkshiremen, like Texans, who boast about the size of their county, claiming proudly that the three ridings contain more acres than there are letters in the Bible. Some are even prepared to include the Apocrypha, but since Yorkshire in fact contains 3 897 940 acres and the Bible has only 3 566 480 letters it seems likely that the county could accommodate the Apocrypha quite comfortably. Yorkshiremen are also intensely loyal to their areas of natural beauty and you are wise not to question the enchantment of the countryside of the Yorkshire Dales or of the moors to the north of here. If you do you are impugning Holy Writ. This association has always been interested not only in promoting the highest standards of medical practice but also in encouraging research. When Sir Charles Hastings gave his Worcester address on the occasion of the founding in 1832 of our predecessor body, the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, he clearly envisaged that the association would be destined to exercise no inconsider? able influence on the future progress of medical science. He himself had gained a reputation for his research on the functions of nerves and on blood vessels and inflammation. The provincial practitioners ofthat era also had before them the shining example of that country practitioner, Edward Jenner, whose work of course in the late eighteenth century led to the total eradication of smallpox nearly two hundred years later. In our own time Pickles's research work in Wensleydale has been an example of what the dedicated and