Abstract
IN his recent presidential address on this subject before the Clinical Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr. J. D. Rolleston said that the formation in 1868 of the Clinical Society of London, the parent of the Clinical Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, was mainly due to Dr. Headlam Greenhow and Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Burdon Sanderson, who were both assistant physicians of Middlesex Hospital, the latter being afterwards appointed Waynflete professor of physiology and eventually regius professor of medicine at Oxford. According to Dr. Rolleston, the most interesting historical event connected with the Clinical Society was the first medical description in Great Britain of X-rays, which was made before it nearly fifty years ago. Early in 1896, the Society invited Prof. Silvanus Thompson to tell its members about the new discovery ; a special meeting was held on March 30, 1896, and was attended by nearly four hundred members. Later, numerous cases illustrating the diagnostic and therapeutic value of X-rays were reported at meetings of the Society and recorded in its Transactions. A remarkable custom in the practice of the Society was the frequent establishment of special committees to discuss various subjects or individual cases. The most important of these committees were those on myxœdema, the periods of incubation and contagiousness of certain infectious diseases and the antitoxin of diphtheria. The course of the Society was successful from the first. At the time of its amalgamation in 1907 with sixteen other societies it numbered 572 ordinary members and 17 honorary members. The first meeting was held on January 10, 1868, under the presidency of Sir Thomas Wilson, who was regarded at the time as the greatest English physician of the century and was author of a text-book on medicine which was without a rival for more than thirty years.
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The Clinical Society of London, 1868–1907. Nature 152, 657 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152657a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152657a0