Progress in Medical Science

Abstract

IN his Sir Halley Stewart Trust Lecture on October 31 in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, E.C.4, Prof. Edward Mellanby, secretary of the Medical Research Council, discussed recent developments in medical science. He said that it is only in the past hundred years that medicine has made substantial advance. This relatively dormant state of knowledge lasting over a period of thousands of years was due partly to the idea that disease was caused by the invasion of the body by evil spirits?a view held by the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians? and partly to the belief that man's body was of no account as compared with his soul?a view held throughout the Middle Ages. Landmarks of medical advancement were introduced on the anatomical side by the Italian school as represented by Vesalius and on the physiological side by Harvey, who gave the first classical demonstration of the possibilities of acquiring knowledge by the experimental method. By the time of Pasteur, the field was set for development and intensive study. Pasteur's work on enzyme action immediately opened up a new chapter of knowledge and led to the work of Lister on antiseptics and of Koch on bacterial disease in general. In the present century, medical research has become more and more intense. In Great Britain, the Medical Research Council was initiated in 1913 and, besides using its own public funds, it has the privilege of working in close association with the efforts of private benefactors such as the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, founded by Lord Iveagh, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the trusts formed by Sir Otto Beit and Sir Halley Stewart. On the administrative side, the greatly increased activities of the Ministry of Health and local health authorities have resulted in the application of new knowledge acquired by research to the practical problems of health.