504 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ing as to the full influence of research. The advantages to the com- 

 munity resulting from research in medicine are advantages because re- 

 "search has done away with conditions which were disadvantageous to 

 the health, the happiness and prosperity of the community — in short 

 such research has removed the impediments to a higher, happier and 

 more prosperous civilization. It is necessary, therefore, in order to 

 emphasize the importance of what has been accomplished, to portray 

 the conditions of community life and individual hygiene, of medical 

 practise and medical thought, and of science and philosophy at such 

 periods as immediately precede definite advances in medical knowledge. 

 The first of these lectures, then, bringing the story down to the begin- 

 ning of the nineteenth century, will be presented from this point of 

 view. The second lecture devoted to the influence of physics and chem- 

 istry, and the third to the rise of bacteriology, will outline the develop- 

 ment of laboratory methods of investigation, the story, essentially, of 

 medicine in the last half of the nineteenth century. The fourth lec- 

 ture will be a survey of present-day methods and problems, and the 

 fifth lecture will be a discussion of the position of medical research in 

 America, its facilities, needs and opportunities, with special reference 

 to medical research as a function of the university. 



Of medicine in the earliest stages of its development we have no 

 knowledge. Not until we arrive at a period of civilization as highly de- 

 veloped as that of the Assyrians and Egyptians do we find references 

 to the practise — the studied practise — of medicine as a healing art. 

 For all that precedes that period we must rely on analogy with med- 

 ical practises among the aboriginal races to-day. But we can, neverthe- 

 less, safely assume that the healing art in all times, no matter how 

 simple its form, was the practise of methods having for their object 

 the relief of pain or the repair of injuries caused by mechanical means. 

 Such methods must have been, at first, instinctive and empiric, or the 

 result of chance observation. Some may, indeed, have been analogous 

 to the methods which an animal adopts to cleanse a wound or protect 

 an injured limb. The use of irritants, of emollients and of scarification, 

 the binding of wounds, the mechanical support of a fracture and assist- 

 ance in childbirth are primitive practises doubtless resulting from 

 chance observation or experience. It is readily conceivable that the use 

 of stone tools and weapons in hunting and in war may have originated 

 the idea of intervention by operation; and that surgical dexterity may 

 have increased proportionately to the improvement of weapons in the 

 bronze age. Likewise it must be assumed that chance experience led 

 to a knowledge of the action of the vegetable and mineral substances 

 of the early materia medica. But of these beginnings we have no his- 

 torical knowledge. 



Our first authentic knowledge of medicine, fragmentary though it 



