Reflections on the spread of tumours by the blood stream and the prevention and control of metastases.

Abstract

Forty-three years ago this month, Sir James Mackenzie Davidson died at the age of 62. He was born and went to school in the Argentine and came home to study medicine in Scotland. After graduating in Aberdeen 80 years ago, he was appointed ophthalmic surgeon to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. An inventive, ingenious person, he took physics for his hobby, spending much of his spare time in experimental work with light and electricity. He was one of the small band of men in Britain who were attuned to the importance of Röntgen's discovery and immediately felt impelled to do something about it. They founded radiology in this country at one bound. They created the Röntgen Society to be the first society of its kind in the world. These, our founders, have always appeared to me to be a remarkable group of men. It takes great courage to abandon an established career and set out on a wild new adventure, and a real adventure it must have been. The changes which radiology was to realise in medicine can only have been dimly seen at that time, but these men had no doubt that a diagnostic revolution was on the way. Mackenzie Davidson was off to Würzburg in 1896 to see for himself. He needed no diploma—from that moment he was a radiologist.