RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 549 



direct value to medicine, in the establishing of sound principles of 

 physiology. 



In the meantime, however, the practise of medicine labored under 

 great difficulties and was largely a matter of empiricism. Without a 

 knowledge of etiology, without pathological anatomy, that firm founda- 

 tion for diagnosis, and without a rational therapy it could be nothing 

 else. Mercury, cinchona, cathartics and bleeding were the general 

 methods of treatment. Great and noble men filled the universities- and 

 hospitals ; they labored conscientiously, and elaborated systems, and did 

 what they could to relieve human misery, l)ut to the advance of the 

 science of medicine they contributed little or nothing. 



Anatomy as a descriptive science dealing with adult structures and 

 their gross appearance had been well established; l)ut it waited for its 

 fullest development upon the methods destined to establish histology 

 and embryolog}'. Experimental physiology, except as Haller and 

 Hunter had influenced it, was an unknown field, soon, however, to be 

 widely explored as the result of the introduction of instruments of pre- 

 cision and analytical methods. Pathology, dependent upon the methods 

 of histology and physiology was marking time, and, in turn, internal 

 medicine awaited the development of pathological anatomy. Surgery, 

 slowly improving technical procedures, likewise marked time until 

 anesthesia and asepsis opened new worlds to it. 



The advance in these general subjects it is my intention to follow 

 along the lines of physics, chemistry and biology, as they developed in 

 France, England and Germany. And, if in the course of this presenta- 

 tion I have much to say about the work shops of these sciences, it is 

 because universities, laboratories and hospitals, as. well as societies and 

 journals, represent the visible machinery of nineteenth century re- 

 search in medicine, and whether we regard them as the cause or the 

 effect of the awakening of 70 years ago, they to-day constitute our hope 

 for the future of medical research. 



It is difficult to select a starting point for a systematic survey. 

 Chemistry, however, appears to promise the most direct course, for it 

 was toward the end of the eighteenth century that Lavoisier intro- 

 duced the modern scientific spirit of exact measurement as applied to 

 chemical phenomena and through it established the great reform re- 

 sponsible for modern chemical knowledge and research. Carbonic acid 

 had already been discovered by Black, hydrogen by Cavendish, nitrogen 

 by Rutherford and ammonia by Priestley; oxygen had been studied bv 

 Priestley, Scheele and Lavoisier, so that with Dalton's atomic theorv, 

 Cavendish's analysis of the air and Lavoisier's study of oxidation, defi- 

 nite knowledge of the chemistry of air and water, and of combustion 

 and respiration was at hand for the use of the physiologist and physio- 

 logical chemist. At about the same time the science of crystallography 



