Report of proceedings at the distribution of prizes in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, Wednesday, May 20th, 1857 / with the address delivered by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth.

  • Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, 1st Baronet
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of proceedings at the distribution of prizes in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, Wednesday, May 20th, 1857 / with the address delivered by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. 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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    veins. At that moment I could not conceive it possible that I should spend every livelong clay of many months in rooms crowded by such bodies, over which would swarm these votaries of a great but thus degraded science. Doubtless these things are much changed since that day, and the evil I describe has been greatly mitigated, if not removed. Yet this strange familiarity with what is most calculated to shock the sense is but the first step in a series of trials, to which sentiment, intellect, and even conscience are exposed. The anatomist arranges the bony skeleton and ponders its curious architecture; but comparative and fossil anatomy come to throw a strange light on its homologies. These nails elsewhere are claws; this arm and these fingers are wings; this hand is a paddle; these toes form strange supports under the mass of the mammoth elephant; this little caudal series of bones elsewhere is a tail; this tooth a tusk; this nose is a long, attenuated snout. But, still more strange, this skull, the seat of intelligence and sensa- tion, is but a developed vertebra. Then, as respects these muscles, these viscera, the lungs, heart, and alimentary apparatus, through a long series ascending generally from the simple to the more complex— science has traced a scale of being, of which man is the lord, so that all beneath him appears to have been made in preparation for his advent, and to administer to his wants. But the reflex of this thought is, how much of this nobler work of creation is common also to the beasts which perish. Then, as we enter on the study of histological physiology, we are taught that the germ of every structure is a cell, and that the ova, from which all organization is developed, are also cells. We can watch with the microscope their
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