PROF. OSLER ON MEDICINAL EXPERIMENTATION.

Evening Star, Issue 12943, 5 May 1908, Page 5

PROF. OSLER ON MEDICINAL EXPERIMENTATION.

A Blue Book contains the remainder of the evidence of several important witnesses called before the Koval Commission on Vivisection during the last three months of 1907. Professor W. Osier, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, said that he thought the story of yellow fever illustrated perhaps more satisfactorily than any other the remarkable way in which experiments carefully devised and carried out may influence not only our knowledge of the eliology of a disease, but may extensively influence the commercial relations of nations, and save not only thousands of lives, but millions of pounds annually. He then detailed the remarkable experiments carried out on human beings in Havana in 1900, with the idea of discovering how far mosquitoes were responsible for the spread of the disease, and said that the discovery that the organism was transmitted from mosquitoes to man, and which set up the fover, would revolntioniso. conditions cf life in the tropics. The discovery of the malarial parasite and the relations of yellow fever with the mosquito would enable the Panama Canal to be built. Without those two investigations the probabihty was that it could not be built, or, . mult, would cost a tremendous sacrifice ot human life. He referred to these experiments only as an illustration that it was through the experimental side of medicine, the experimental spirit in medicine, that these great revolutions have been effected—revolutions with which there is nothing ePo in human endeavor to compare from the standpoint of humanity. ITiere was not anything else in the whole development of the British nation that was going to have so much importance ns the discovery of the mode of transmission of malaria. Tt was going to make the tropics habitable, and all this had come about through the experimental method and the experimental spirit. It was the same spirit that gave us nnrcstlicsia, antiseptic surgery, and preventive medicine.