THE PASSING OF MORBID ANATOMY
Twenty-seven years ago, in delivering the Bradshawe lecture before our College, I stood in the place of a much-regretted Fellow, the late Dr. Mahomed, dead in his early prime, when in a retrospect of his work on Arterial Tension I had the more easy task of recalling still recent memories. To-day, when in pursuance of the honourable duty that you. Sir, in your kindness, have imposed upon me, I try to look back into the mists of centuries, to the full life and ever to be revered memory of Harvey, no longer can one appeal to those personal recollections in which we all could share and sympathize : in place thereof is an influence, a resurrection, and my outlook becomes essentially prospective.
Harvey’s influence as it is permeating the avenues of time! What a subject, what an opportunity! Yet when some two hundred and fifty-six years have come and gone, since this annual commemoration of our benefactors was instituted by Harvey himself, what an impossibility, in any but the most spectral form.
May I try to present it to you thus, on the wings of a thought—The Passing of Morbid Anatomy—as it flits across the horizon of pathology, and in so doing touches us and humanity at large. No
