The Irradiation of Liquids

Abstract

It is my first duty to acknowledge the honour done me by the Council of your Society in choosing me as the Silvanus Thompson Lecturer for the year, and to thank them for this token of their goodwill. Like A. E. Housman on a somewhat similar occasion, “I condemn their judgment and deplore their choice.” Nevertheless, it gives me the greatest pleasure to pay my tribute to the memory of a man whose scientific work commanded my greatest admiration and whose character I sincerely respected. In my lecture to-day I propose to deal with a few selected topics concerning the irradiation of liquids. If I confine myself mainly to recent work done in my own department, it is not that I fail to appreciate the far greater value and importance of the work being done in this subject elsewhere—quite the contrary—but I am merely shirking the larger task to deal with matters with which I am more familiar. The discoveries of the neutron and positron in 1932, and of the method of artificial production of radio-active substances in the following year, excited the greatest interest throughout the scientific and medical world, and stimulated the same enthusiastic spirit of inquiry which, forty-four years ago, resulted in the foundation of our Society by Silvanus Thompson and others. It was natural to consider at once the possible applications of these discoveries to the treatment of disease, and the investigations described today were undertaken at St. Bartholomew's Hospital with this possibility in view.