548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



EE SEARCH IX MEDICIXEi 



By Peofessoe RICHARD M. PEARCE 



UNIVEESITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



II. The Development of Laboratories for the Medical Sciences 



IT would be interesting to trace in the events and activities of the 

 later years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth 

 centuries that development of general thought which exerted indirectly 

 an influence on modern medicine; but, under the circumstances, I can 

 outline only a few ; it was the period of the struggle for American Inde- 

 pendence, of the French Eevolution and of England's abolition of the 

 slave trade. The world was becoming wiser and more humane; men and 

 women were no longer hanged for witchcraft; the principle of educa- 

 tion for all was being recognized; and it was also at this time that the 

 insane were treated as persons ill of disease and not as prisoners, to be 

 chained together and crowded into filthy pens until death should end 

 their misery. 



Captain Cook was enlarging the boundaries of the known world, 

 Daguerre was establishing the art of photography, Murdoch was de- 

 veloping the use of coal gas as an illuminant. Watts was improving the 

 steam engine, Fulton was concerned with the steamboat and Stephen- 

 son somewhat later with the steam locomotive. Machinery was being 

 invented to replace hand labor, and advances in technical and indus- 

 trial procedures were raj^idly following one another. 



It was likewise a period marked by the rise of great chemists and 

 physicists, as Lavoisier, Scheele, Priestley, Avogadro, Dalton, Gay-Lus- 

 sac, Davy, Volta, Franklin and Galvani; great naturalists as Cuvier, 

 Humboldt and Lamarck; and great astronomers and mathematicians 

 as Herschel and Laplace. At the time, the activities of these men were 

 not seen to be directly contributory to the science and practise of medi- 

 cine, but as the years went on and it became more and more evident — 

 largely as the result of their work — that knowledge was to be gained 

 not by establishing all-embracing systems of philosophy, but by the ac- 

 cumulation of facts through exact observation and experiment, their 

 methods became the property of all branches of science and so, natu- 

 rally, of medicine. In addition to method, moreover, these men offered, 

 in the fruits of their labors, a not inconsiderable amount of data of 



^ The Hitchcock lectures, delivered at the University of California, January 

 23-26, 1912. 



