branches, in addition to the usual clerical staffs at headquarters and district offices. It is a question of salaries.

The general secretary, who has no time for any other work, receives a salary of 450l. a year, plus living accommodation; the president, Mr J. T. Brownlie, acknowledged by all as a most skilful organiser, receives 4751.; and all other full-time officials, 400l. per annum. Moreover, a close check is kept on expenses. The district officials have to submit their monthly expenses to the local district committee, composed of men working at the trade, and it was only last August the expenses of an organiser were queried because the committee considered them excessive.

The National Committee of the A.E.U., at its annual meeting in May, decided to reduce all officials' salaries, with the exception of the president and general secretary, by 50l. a year, and to discontinue the annual grant of 150l. to the A.E.U. members of Parliament. The Committee also effected economies in branch and district administration. It is interesting to note here that another union, whilst effecting economies by cutting down the remuneration of the less paid officials, left the bigger salaries untouched. If the Amalgamated Engineering Union with all its ramifications, with its scattered units, its comprehensive scales of benefits, its huge income, can run the organisation efficiently on such low expenses, it is clear to the meanest intelligence that other organisations with extremely high working expenses are playing fast and loose with the funds.

It is a patent fact that in Government offices and undertakings, Borough Council and County Council offices and undertakings, and all other corporate bodies and undertakings, where the funds are raised by taxes, rates, or levies and administered by committees or councils, and where the administrators are responsible to a public body, there is a tendency to spend money regardless of economy. The same tendency appears to prevail in the unions. That's all right, the union can afford it, seems to be the attitude of most officials. After all, it is easy to exploit the machinery of the organisation in order to supplement the funds by means of further levies should the exchequer become depleted. And that is exactly what is done in many instances.

So long as there is a continuous supply of contributions and levies, so long as the officials can influence their executives and national assemblies with tearful tales of the tremendous amount of hard work they have to do, and of how expensive it is to be an official, those gentlemen will continue to draw big salaries and heavy 'expenses,' and the unions will be burdened with hordes of well-paid men who are by no means overworked, as any one familiar with union administration well knows.

As has been shown, by holding more than one paid office some officials enjoy an annual income of nearly 20007., and they are not above taking expenses from every organisation they represent. Others, by taking the fullest advantage of information gained by constant contact with business men, have judiciously invested their savings in various capitalistic undertakings, and have thereby become comparatively wealthy and, incidentally, as 'parasitic' as they often tell us the employers are.

No sensible man would suggest that officials are unnecessary, or that they should only receive remuneration equal to the wages received by the members; but, as has already been pointed out, trade unions exist primarily for the protection of the interests of the whole of the membership, and the funds contributed by the rank and file should not be used to provide officials with princely salaries and excessive expenses. It is a question for the rank and file themselves to deal with. They should raise the matter in their branches and, through the proper channels, take steps to put a stop to the sometimes almost criminal extravagance of officialism.

If it could be proved that all this lavish expenditure on salaries and expenses had been devoted to the real welfare of the working classes; to the promotion of harmony between masters and men; to the best economic means of production and to sound methods of reducing unemployment, then some show of justification might be pleaded; but the reverse has been the case. All these well-paid officials must make a display of work to justify their existence; if peace and prosperity reigned many of them would find themselves among the ranks of the unemployed, and so it is to be feared that it is the system which is at fault-as it tends to make peace and quiet less profitable than strife and unrest.

A TRADE UNIONIST.

Art. 7.-SOME PIONEERS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY.

The Beloved Physician, Being the Life of Sir James Mackenzie. By R. MacNair Wilson. Murray, 1926. And other works.

THE history of medicine is fascinating. To pass along the highway of discovery, from weird philtres and concoctions to 'Opsonic Registers'; to step aside into dark cells and chambers where monks, chirurgeons, and leeches passed laborious days of mystery, and then to enter the modern laboratory where the all-pervading microbe is discovered, caught, and manipulated; to glance for a moment into some room where the surgeon stood with flashing knife ready to perpetrate his butchery and then to find oneself amid the light and calm deliberation of the modern theatre; to trace the gradual evolution of the marvellous appliances and systems which are at the service of suffering humanity to-day, is to find one's way through the pages of a romantic story. The accounts of the labours and self-sacrifice, the perseverance and courage of the pioneers in medicine and surgery; the stories of the country practitioners who lived as the guides, philosophers, and friends of their patients and neighbours, such as is told in the late Dr Bishop's 'My Moorland Patients'; the untiring devotion to duty of the hospital surgeons; the unceasing labours of the doctors in warfare; the kindness, the sympathy, the large-heartedness of the family physicians-it all reads like a golden legend.

Looking, however, at the other side of the shield the story may be aptly described as a tragic serial.' Evolution has not gone quietly and smoothly in one continued progression, but, as we say, in fits and starts. There have been moments when the light shone clearly, succeeded by periods of gloom and darkness; times when a sudden rush was followed by stagnation and depression: years, when men glowed with hope, leading only to a climax of disappointment and despair. The booming of some treatment or system in one generation has witnessed its abandonment in the next; while often its sure discovery has been resented rather than welcomed

as an advance. Conservatism has invariably acted as a clog on discovery. Most change has meant the eclipse of some star in the firmament, and, therefore, has been resisted blindly, fiercely, at times unscrupulously.

Generally there have been two opposing schools who have striven eagerly to belittle the work, or discredit the theories, of the others. Whatever was proposed, or practised, by the one was decried by the other. A calm and deliberate perusal of the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion that the pundit can never be regarded as infallible. To pass along the highway is to stumble constantly over the fallen statues of earlier gods and demi-gods, to trip over the ruins of systems and reputations. It is a commonplace that 'doctors differ,' that 'no two surgeons agree'; and most people at some time or other have had painful experience of the truth of the adage. Diagnosis is not always easy, and the mistakes that have been made so frequently cannot always be laid at the door of only the less exalted members of the profession.

It is interesting to note that all the great advances and discoveries have been due to the genius of some individual. The successful introduction of the discovery to the medical world has been due to the personality, perseverance, and indomitable endeavour of one person, generally in the face of opposition, paltry, mean, and sometimes unscrupulous. A man, at the moment unknown, has had to fight and struggle to secure recognition, to break down prejudice unaided, to endure attack and, what is perhaps worse, neglect before obtaining a hearing. No help has been offered to him; often it has meant the ruin of his practice, and the curtailment of his means. It has only been by sheer force of character that at last he has found himself possessed of an impregnable citadel. A striking example of this will be found in the Life of Sir James Mackenzie, to which we will return later.

When a general practitioner, perhaps in a distant shire, has found himself in possession of some revelation which clearly meant the alleviation of pain and suffering, there has been no central body to which he could refer, and from whom he could expect encouragement, sympathy, and help. He has had to fight his battle alone, to plough

his lonely furrow, often to eat out his heart with disappointment and chagrin. Several courses are open to him if he is sufficiently enthusiastic and forceful. He may write a paper and perhaps secure an invitation to read it before the members of one of the medical societies; he may manage to write an article and secure its admission to one of the medical journals; or he may indite a pamphlet and publish it at his own expense, in the hope of securing the notice of his brethren; but 'in general, the results of investigations such as these, too often buried in elaborate monographs, may never reach the physician in a form to bring home their application to his mind and in his practice.'* Substantiation of the statements that have been made is not difficult.

The discovery of the circulation of the blood was the occasion for assaults and controversies on every hand. A young Englishman, William Harvey, had journeyed to Padua in order to pursue his anatomical studies under the great Fabricius. While in residence there, during the years 1598 to 1600, he learned of the existence of the valves in the veins of the extremities, which gave the first impulse to his prolonged researches, resulting in the world-famous discovery. On Aug. 4, 1615, he was elected Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians, and in the following April he delivered, at the College in Knightrider Street, the lectures in which he first made public his thoughts on the circulation of the blood. He announced his discovery publicly in the year 1619. It was not until nine years later that he published his celebrated dissertation at Frankfort, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis.' The book at once aroused attention and widespread discussion. Many scientists remained unconvinced. The struggle was long and tense. Year after year we see him bringing the subject before the Royal College of Physicians, debating, arguing, corresponding, visiting his continental brethren, toiling on manfully in the face of the envy and opposition of the physicians, subject to the insults of the vulgar who regarded him as a 'crack-brained' dreamer, while he had the mortification of seeing his practice decay.

Riolan, the most eminent of French anatomists, offered the most absurd objections; Reid, the Lecturer on * Vide Harveian Oration,' by Sir Richard Quain, Oct. 19, 1885,