Abstract
THE scientific report of the Royal College of Surgeons of England forthe past year reveals the extraordinary diversity of work which is beingcarried out in the Museum, Research Laboratories and the Buckston BrowneSurgical Research Farm, in spite of the fact that work has been severelyhandicapped by a rebuilding programme which will give the College of Surgeons a unique research unit. There has been great activity in almost every field. In the Museum, the Pathological Curator reports considerable progress in the renewing of the pathological series, and in the fields of physical anthropology there have been large accessions of human material from archaeological excavations in Great Britain and abroad. As for the purely research activities of the College, these have been carried on, although under difficult conditions, in temporary laboratories at St. Bartholomew's Medical School and at the Buckston Browne Research Farm. To mention only a few of the outstanding investigations which have been pursued in the course of the year, great progress has been made in the development of operative technique for the treatment of certain forms of heart disease, technique which has been most successful in its clinical applications. Work on the physiology of the urinary system has done much to solve the problem of the nervous control of the pelvis and ureter. Experimental research on nerve grafting, begun the previous year, has been continued, and is producing results which are of the greatest interest. Of particular importance from a practical point of view is the work on high blood pressure, which disease has been reproduced in the experimental animal, and has been found to resemble closely in its clinical features and histology arterial hypertension in the human. A fundamental problem which has been tackled is that of the relation of the central nervoussystem to carbohydrate metabolism and heat regulation, and we look forward with considerable interest to the further fruits of these investigations.
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Research of the Royal College of Surgeons. Nature 141, 111 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141111a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141111a0