TY - JOUR T1 - Saltire award: science and the limits of science JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 84 LP - 84 DO - 10.3399/bjgp19X701093 VL - 69 IS - 679 AU - Graham Watt Y1 - 2019/02/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/69/679/84.abstract N2 - The Saltire Society celebrates the Scottish imagination. In accepting its 2018 Fletcher of Saltoun Award for Science, Professor Graham Watt replied, quoting and explaining Andrew Fletcher’s dictum, ‘if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation’, which features at the start of the book he has compiled: The Exceptional Potential of General Practice.1 He began by quoting Henry Sigerist: ‘The … practitioners of a distressed area are the natural advocates of the people. They well know the factors that paralyse all their efforts. They are not only scientists but also responsible citizens, and if they did not raise their voice, who else should?’2Science is important, finding out what it is possible to know by observation and experiment, making the occasional breakthrough, chiselling away at doubt, and protecting us from fads and fancies. But science is not the source of all knowledge.Sir Walter Scott, as President of the Royal … ER -