The President of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir J.
Russell Reynolds, is also President, for the year, of the British Medical Association, which commenced its sixty-third annual meeting on Tuesday at the Imperial Institute, where Sir J. Russell Reynolds delivered a remarkably interesting address, of which the leading note was the apparently much greater therapeutic importance of organic tissues, than of the- old inorganic medicines, in the production of powerful effects,. whether healing or noxious, on the organs of the living body. Sir J. Russell Reynolds referred chiefly to the use of the thyroid gland in the cure of cretinism, and the supposed immunity from poisonous bites and other degradations of the blood caused by the injection of the serum of animals previously inoculated with milder forms of the same blood disease. The latter surely is as yet an assumption very far from verified. He also dwelt on the vitality and influence of microbes, both for good and for evil; but there, again, the distinction between those which are poisonous and those which are of the first importance to- sound health is so little established, that the germ theory can hardly be said to have contributed as yet anything sub- stantial to the cure of disease. The Presidential address was, however, from a literary point of view, very interesting, and its criticisms on the rather clumsy christening of morbid processes, with the names of the physicians or surgeons who had first studied and described them, was very effective. To name a particular kind of morbid breathing after Cheyne- Stokes, a peculiar pulse after Corrigan, another symptom of disease after Graefe, and so on, is certainly to create a class of sinister relationships which will do the repute of the godfathers of these ill-omened symptoms no great service.
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