Notes

Abstract

SPEAKING at St. George's Hospital Medical School on Friday last, Lord Kelvin remarked:—The modern medical man must be a scientific man, and, what is more, he must be a philosopher. The fundamental studies of medicine are of. a strictly materialistic kind, but they belong to a different world from the world which constitutes their main subject —the world of life. Let it not be imagined that any hocuspocus of electricity or viscous fluids will make a living cell. Splendid and interesting work has recently been done in what was formerly called organic chemistry, a great French chemist taking the lead. This is not the occasion for a lecture on the borderland between what is called organic and what is called inorganic; but it is interesting to know that materials belonging to the general class of foodstuffs, such as sugar, and what might be also called a foodstuff, alcohol, can be made out of the chemical elements. But let not youthful minds be dazzled by the imaginings of the daily newspapers that because Berthelot and others have thus made foodstuffs they can make living things, or that there is any prospect of a process being found in any laboratory for making a living thing, whether the minutest germ of bacteriology or anything smaller or greater. There is an absolute distinction between crystals and cells. Anything that crystallises may be made by the chemist. Nothing approaching to the cell of a living creature has ever yet been made. The general result of an enormous amount of exceedingly intricate and thoroughgoing investigation by Huxley and Hooker and others of the present age, and by some of their predecessors in both the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, is that no artificial process whatever can make living matter out of dead. This is vastly beyond the subject of the chemical laboratory, vastly beyond my own subject of physics or of electricity—beyond it in depth of scientific significance and in human interest.