You have in Scotland the merit of the practical introduction of a method which has revolutionized the treatment of wounds, and changed the whole aspect of modern surgery. I am old enough to have been a dresser in a large general hospital in the pre-Listerian days, when it was the rule for wounds to suppurate, and when cases of severe pyæmia and septicæmia were so common that surgeons dreaded to make even a simple amputation. In the wards of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Lord Lister's experimental work on the healing of wounds led to results of the deepest moment to every individual subject to an accident, or who has to submit to an operation. It is not simply that the prospect of recovery is enormously enhanced, but Listerian surgery has diminished suffering to an extraordinary degree. In the old days every wound which suppurated had to be dressed, and there was the daily distress and pain, felt particularly by young children. Now, even after operations of the first magnitude, the wound may have but a single dressing, and the after-pain is reduced to a minimum. How well the older ones of us realize that anæsthetics and asepsis between them have wrought a complete revolution in hospital life. I asked the Superintendent of Nurses at the Royal Infirmary to let me know how many patients last night in the wards had actual suffering, and she has sent word that about one in eight had pain, not all of them acute pain. But man's redemption of man is nowhere so well known as in the abolition and prevention of the group of diseases which we speak of as the fevers, or the acute infections. This is the glory of the science of medicine, and nowhere in the world have its lessons been so thoroughly carried out as in this country. It is too old a story to retell in detail, but I may remind you that in this city within fifty years there has been an annual saving of from four to five thousand lives, by measures which have directly prevented and limited the spread of infectious diseases. The man is still alive, Sir Henry Little-John, who made the first sanitary survey of the city. When one reads the account of the condition of the densely crowded districts on the south side of the High Street, one is not surprised that the rate of mortality was 40 and over per thousand. That you now enjoy one of the lowest death rates in Europe--15.3 per thousand for last year--is due to the thoroughness with which measures of recognized efficiency have been carried out. When we learn that last year there were no deaths from smallpox, not one from typhus, and only 21 from fevers of the zymotic group, it is scarcely credible that all this has been brought about within the memory of living men. It is not too much to say that the abolition of small-pox, typhus and typhoid fevers have changed the character of the medical practice in our hospitals. In this country typhoid fever is in its last ditch, and though a more subtle and