Memorial to the late Sir Walter Morley Fletcher (1873-1933) : secretary of the Medical Research Council, 1914-1933.

Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memorial to the late Sir Walter Morley Fletcher (1873-1933) : secretary of the Medical Research Council, 1914-1933. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Medical Research Council seemed to him the chance of a life¬ time. To bring together science and public administration for the good of the people of England, of India, of the Empire, and of humanity at large—that was the ideal that inspired him. All his life, since first he could distinguish, he had felt deeply and talked indignantly of the waste of human material and happiness through lay ignorance and through the State’s neglect of research and science. That Oxford should supply the politicians and Cambridge the men of science, and that there should be a wall of mutual ignorance between them, was an evil on which he used often to descant. So he rejoiced to serve in this cause under Arthur Balfour, the Cambridge politician, who understood the issue as he did. But his great co-operator in the Civil Service had been an Oxford man—Sir Robert Morant, a man after his own heart. Fletcher believed in our free and popular form of govern¬ ment—he was essentially a Liberal in mind—but he well knew one of the besetting sins of our English democratic Govern¬ ment—its want of reverence for scientific knowledge as a guide to public action. He rejoiced, therefore, when the Govern¬ ment at last consented to endow research through the Medical Research Committee. It might be the beginning of a new epoch, for it was his doctrine that every branch of statecraft required a fuller use of biological science to raise our C3 nation to health of body and mind—a problem we are only now beginning to tackle.
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