'The British Association met at Liverpool on the 16th inst.,
and the President of the year, Sir Joseph Lister, delivered a most interesting address on the interdependence of science and the healing arts. The great advances recently made, both in medicine and surgery, were due, he said, to scientific investigation. He gave as instances the discovery of the Röntgen rays, which, by rendering bones visible under their covering, makes surgery far more certain, and may ultimately throw new light upon all forms of disease, beginning with the diseases of the heart. He next quoted the use of aums- thetics, which began on September 30th, 1846, just fifty years ago, when Dr. W. T. G. Morton, of Boston, U.S.A., ex. tracted a tooth under the vapour of ether, and which now enables surgeons to dare operations that the shock caused by agony formerly made impossible, and proceeded to describe the advance of antiseptic surgery, for which he is himself so famous. Putrefaction ceased under antiseptic treatment to be a source of danger, deaths from gangrene, which in the great hospital of Munich rose to 80 per cent., having totally ceased. He gave many other illustrations of success in the science of bacteriology, the most interesting perhaps being the recent discovery that the white corpuscules of the blood, which are living cells and can move, so to speak fight the deadly microbes, and extirpating them, allow healing to occur. In each of these improvements in healing the advance was due to strictly scientific inquiry, and not to empirical experiment, which the speaker deprecated, the duty of the doctor being not to add to his own knowledge by experiments on his patient, but to use all his knowledge to effect his cure.
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