Carrot poultices found favour with many people; but those made with “red onions” (mashed and cold) were rejected as “mostly too irritating.” In such a preface as this, it would be impertinent to use technical words, or to touch so much as the fringe of medical controversy; but it is no more than a truism to say that the cause and character of cancerous disease have not yet been revealed beyond dispute to the eye of science. Nevertheless the pathologist of to-day has passed far beyond the stage of mesmerism, onions, carrots, and Lord Arundel’s cure. How far and how fast that progress is to continue depends to a large extent upon the opportunities available; of able and devoted workers there will be no dearth. The Middlesex Hospital is doing its best, and will earnestly endeavour to facilitate scientific research for the good of the public, so long as public assistance and support are forthcoming. Mr. Kipling naturally refrained from expounding such opinions on general medical questions as he may happen to entertain; but beyond giving passing pleasure to a restricted audience, he will have done enduring good if his speech may become the means of calling the attention of an unreflecting generation to certain aspects of a doctor’s life which are persistently ignored. To emphasise these points would only be to say again, and say less well, what will be found in the address which follows; but even the man who beats the drum outside the tent may contribute something to the popularity of the show within. The students of the Medical School are the physicians and surgeons of to-morrow, and it should be no small encouragement to them to hear their profession described in such honourable terms. Many men and women, probably a great majority, regard all doctors as necessary evils. For surgeons they entertain rather a fearful admiration; the physician they dismiss with the complacent summary that it is curious that medicine should have made no progress whilst surgery has advanced by leaps and bounds; which is not true in fact, and not fair to a class of men pre-eminently earnest, self-sacrificing, and single-minded. The Presidential Address delivered at the opening of the Session of the Medical Society of London, in 1907, had this fallacy for its text, and it is much to be regretted that such papers seldom reach beyond the confines of the profession. The author here sweeps away a mass of illusions born of ignorance; and not only claims for medicine some share of the credit given to surgery for accuracy of diagnosis and efficiency of treatment, but boldly lays it down that “having regard to the wide field which it covers, the advance of medicine has been during the last thirty years infinitely greater in the mass than that of surgery, although not perhaps so readily appreciable by the public.”