Science and War

Abstract

WE are permitted to publish this week some passages from Sir William Osier's address to the Leeds Medical School on “Science and War” (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Price 1s. 6d, net). Sir William writes with authority and with distinction: and all who love good thoughts arrayed in good style ought to buy this address and read it with care. He keeps his head clear, though he has chosen a theme vast beyond imagination. The war transcends our powers of thought; so does science. The war has gone beyond us; so has science. Yet he is able, more than most of us, to measure the working together of the immeasurable forces of science and war: for he has always in his head, and in his heart, the duplicity of science. “I bring to life, I bring to death,” says Science. In the war, my Lady Science is busy both ways. She employs artists in death and artists in life; she supplies them—so impartial are abstractions— with asphyxiating gases and with antiseptic dressings; she manufactures with equal mind high explosives and protective vaccines, submarines and motor-ambulances. What a thing it is to be an abstraction, a name for systema -tised thought; to have no morals, no likes or dislikes; to be nothing but a Latin word for the best way of doing what is to be done.