The history of the study of anatomy in Cambridge : a lecture delivered January 29, 1891, on the opening of the new anatomical lecture room / by A. Macalister.

  • Macalister, Alexander, 1844-
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of the study of anatomy in Cambridge : a lecture delivered January 29, 1891, on the opening of the new anatomical lecture room / by A. Macalister. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    memories, and we all most heartily unite in wishing that he may be spared for many years to participate in the prosperity of our University Medical School, w^hose present vigour and activity are so largely due to him. In many branches of ana- tomy the researches of Humphry have become classical. His work On the Human Skeleton was an epoch-making monograph in British Anatomy; and his various works on Myology are all of the highest importance to comparative anatomists. It was therefore a well-merited tribute to his position as the foremost of British anatomists that he Avas chosen as the first president of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. It will be unnecessary to make more than a passing allusion to those more recent advances in organization which have taken place in our school. The differentiation attendant on increase and specialization of function has eventuated in another professorial * mitosis' and fission; and now Physiology is sepa- rated from Anatomy, and is under the presidence of the most renowned of British physiologists, Michael Foster. I must make a claim for the share of Anatomy in many of the researches of our unequalled staff of teachers in Physiology. The labours of Gaskell on the organization of the central and peripheral nervous system, of Lea on the structure of the pancreas, of Langley on the salivary glands—all are solid advances in Anatomy. On the staff of our anatomical department we have the good fortune to include Dr Hill, the Master of Downing College, whose researches on the central nervous system are important contributions to Morphology, and in whom I have a colleague upon whose ready help and sympathy I can always depend. And now in entering upon our new place of abode, with the increase of advantage in room, in light, in appliances, it behoves us to realize our responsibilities as the inheritors of the tradi- tions of the past. It is not given to every one to add as our forerunners have done to the sum of anatomical knowledge, but it is the duty cf all to be learners. Let us make the practical side of the science particularly our aim, and let it be the characteristic of our school in the future as it has been in the past, that whatever