134 PATHOLOGY 



and botany, physics and chemistry, were taught by physicians. We 

 need only recall Haller and his great teacher Boerhaave, who suc- 

 cessively occupied the chairs of botany and chemistry, of practical 

 and theoretic medicine, and attained fame in all these branches. 

 All this has changed in the course of time; the children have sepa- 

 rated from their mother and have further developed themselves, 

 and their development to great sciences has proceeded more rapidly 

 than that of pathology. The time is not long past when the emanci- 

 pated looked down on pathology and would not recognize it as an 

 equal science. Did not Virchow find it necessary, before the congress 

 of German naturalists, in 1867, * to insist on the scientific equality 

 of pathology, and to demand that the so-called exact natural sciences 

 should recognize pathology as an equal companion. 



In fact, as pathology (excepting in purely etiologic studies) cannot 

 do without physics and chemistry, as she also strives to refer patho- 

 logic phenomena to physical and chemic laws, so she has given some- 

 thing to these sciences and even to the present time has furnished 

 workers which have assured themselves a lasting place in the history 

 of exact sciences. Is not the mention of the name of the physician, 

 Robert Mayer, the discoverer of the law of conservation of energy, 

 and of Helmholtz, who began his professorship in Konigsberg with 

 lectures on general pathology, sufficient proof? The literature of 

 Rontgen, radium, and other light-rays shows sufficiently how to this 

 day pathology takes part in the investigation of physical problems. 



These investigations lead to another especially important field, 

 that of chemistry. Questions which were determined in the chemical 

 laboratory of my institute, the proof, namely, that by the effect of 

 radium rays on cancer tissue impediments which stood in the way 

 of the action of preexisting cytolysins are set aside, are nothing but 

 chemic questions. Thirteen years ago I stated in a rector's address, 2 

 that only pathologic chemistry on a basis of cellular pathology 

 could t#ke us further in the study of infectious diseases, that the 

 chemistry of bacteria, the normal and pathologic chemistry of the 

 cells, was the problem of the future. This statement can be enlarged 

 upon; in whatever branch of modern pathology we seek progress, 

 we finally always meet chemic questions, and it needs no prophet 

 to tell us that the greatest progress of pathology in the immediate 

 future will be along the lines of chemistry. In all directions patho- 

 logists have united with chemists to further the study of the chem- 

 istry of proteids. Physicians and pathologists have furthered the 

 knowledge of precipitins, agglutinins, and lysins of various sorts, 

 not only in their practical but also in their purely scientific relations, 

 and have begun to study these substances along different lines. 



1 Ueber die neueren Fortschritte in der Pathologic, Vortrag in der 2. allgemeinen 

 Sitzung am 20. September, 1867. 



' Ueber d. Fortschritte der Aetiologi*, QOttmgen, 4. June, 1891. 



