Intravascular contrast media--the past, the present and the future. Mackenzie Davidson Memorial Lecture, April 1981.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am greatly honoured by being invited to deliver this, the 57th Mackende Davidson Lecture, for this is one of the greatest distinctions that British radiology can bestow. James Mackenzie Davidson, born in 1856, graduated M.B., CM. in 1882 at Aberdeen University and became an ophthalmic surgeon at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. But he was much more versatile than a mere doctor of clinical medicine. Mackenzie Davidson was a great experimentalist and an enthusiastic proponent and public lecturer in the natural sciences. He was so greatly excited by Rontgen's discovery of X-rays in November 1895, that he visited Rontgen at Wurzburg, Germany, a few months later. The very next year he left Aberdeen and moved to London to work as consultant surgeon at the Royal London Ophthalmic, Moorfields and Charing Cross Hospitals with particular responsibility to establish their departments of radiology. Mackenzie Davidson soon became an acknowledged leader of the fledgling profession of...