APOSTLES OF LIGHT

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6545, 18 November 1924, Page 1

APOSTLES OF LIGHT

FThese are men who are said to leave their mark upon their time — which speedily becomes the dead past, bearing its dead marks as if it had never been,” writes “Lens” in the New Statesman.

“There are others who may or may not leave a mark upon their time, but whose-lives become and must ever remain part of the living present, which is forever different because they have been, To discuss such men is as appropriate a century after their death as on the following day, and William Maddock Bayliss was one of them. His was the proper study of mankind, Uluminated by the study of other forms of life. He left us the greatest treatise ever Written on this subject —the General Physiology—an acknowledged masterpiece which will be consulted and by students for cehturies to come, and in which, quite apart from his own researches, the power of his mind makes new and significant the whole, body of facts hitherto accumulated.

“Shortly after I began writing about Rollier .and sunlight in these pages Bayliss wrote a letter in which his most powerful name reinforced my plea for inquiry into sie utterly unknown modus operand! of the celestial medicament. Hence the formation, early in 1922, of the Committee on Light, of the Medical Research Council, with Bayliss as its chairman. Characteristic of Bayliss was his suggestion, in the letter abovd mentioned that light may act chiefly by ‘reflex stimulation through the nervous system.’,. IV anyone other than he had discovered hormones and their meaning, he would, have suggested that light acts chiefly by producing hormones in the skin. That I have always believed to be the case, and latterly the discoverer of hormones bean, I think, to be of the same opinion. * “However that may. be> I shall always rejoice'to have had the privilege of taking the big Swiss to visit the little Englishman irfthis laboratory in University, College, l where they sat and chatted, whilst I looked on and admired them both—the simple clinician, without a peer on' earth in his own line, giving life and joy and beauty to the moribund, the miserable and the hideous in thousands, and not troubling himself much about the bottomless mysteries involved; and the profound philosopher who had been sickened, as a medical student, by the futilities of anatomy, as then and noiv taught, had failed in his examination therein, and had thus never treated a patient; but.both alike in this, that in person, voice, manner, and heart, self-effacing modesty was their most conspicuous trait.”