Excerpt from Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics: The Cavendish Lecture, 1912, an Address to the Medical Profession The founder of our laboratory, Sir Francis Galton, was descended on one side from a stock which was clinical by instinct, and produced a number of medical men of distinction. Erasmus Darwin and Robert Darwin are still honoured names in medicine. Sir Francis Darwin, being on a pleasure journey in the East, settled down in charge of a plague hospital that he might understand the nature of plague. His nephew and godson, Francis Galton - then a medical student of the Birming ham General Hospital - found his chief disappointment in visiting Smyrna that the plague was over, and that he could not study it at first hand. He spent nearly four years in medical studies, partly before and partly after his mathematical work' at Cambridge, and when independence came to him on the death of his father, he tells us I abandoned all thought of becoming a physician, but felt most grateful for the enlarged insight into Nature that I had acquired through medical experiences Memories, p. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.