WILLIAM TOWNSEND PORTER 95 







arterial tube into the reservoir again. The preparation 

 had been placed in a small bottle and was passed from 

 hand to hand. The committee thought it a wonderful 

 sight ; and so it was. It could not have been described. 



No one would intrust an express train to an engineer 

 who had studied only the picture of an engine in a book. 

 The body is a machine much more intricate than a loco- 

 motive. No one would willingly employ a physician who 

 had never seen a patient. Yet there are many books that 

 describe as well as books can the symptoms of disease. 

 Disease is the abnormal action of living organs ; physi- 

 ology treats of their normal action. If their abnormal 

 action cannot be learned from books, neither can their 

 normal action. 



The committee also visited the laboratories in which the 

 medical students were performing physiological experi- 

 ments. There they saw about two hundred men at work. 

 Each student was provided with a desk and the apparatus 

 necessary for his experiments. The work was done for 

 the most part upon frogs ; but the students performed 

 many experiments, as, for example, those on the pulse, 

 upon each other. 



The petitioners who desire that medical students be 

 taught physiology from books have insisted that observa- 

 tions made upon the lower animals cannot be applied to 

 human beings. The petitioners are correct in believing 

 that there is a great difference between the lower animals 

 and man. They fail, however, to understand that this 

 difference concerns the highest functions of the nervous 

 system the sensations and perceptions, and especially 

 the perception of pain. In this respect the difference is, 

 indeed, great; but it ends here. The fundamental phe- 

 nomena of life, such as the action of the heart, and the 

 function of the muscles and the peripheral nerves, are 

 remarkably alike in all vertebrates. A very large part of 



