556 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



rational therapy and for this reason the science of most interest in 

 medicine. Pathology owes its position as a recognized science to the 

 genius of VirchoW;, but, in its development, it also owes much to the 

 period I have just discussed, as I will show in due time. To present 

 this development properly it is necessary to turn back to 1761 and 

 Morgagni. I must again remind you that in Morgagni's time medical 

 science can hardly be said to have existed. It was the period of a vague 

 philosophy which attempted to systematize diseases according to symp- 

 toms, with no reference to the anatomical conditions causing the symp- 

 toms. It was Morgagni who first insisted that the clinical history 

 should be set side by side with the results of the autopsy and who by 

 his publication " De Sedibus et Causis Morborum " threw the first 

 gleam of light on the causes and nature of diseased processes, and thus 

 gave a stimulus to the study of pathological anatomy. Before Mor- 

 gagni's time, and for some time after, pathological anatomy was mainly 

 concerned with the recording of the rare and curious, with malforma- 

 tions and obvious departures from the normal type ; observations often- 

 times interesting, but not systematized or harmonized. Morgagni is 

 responsible for the maxim that observations should be " weighed not 

 counted," and it was undoubtedly this point of view which influenced 

 his observations and led eventually to the doctrine that most diseases 

 were to be explained by changes in the organs of the body. 



Another step in advance was taken when Bichat, about a quarter of 

 a century later, referred disease to the tissues of the organs. In the 

 meantime John Hunter (1738-1793) had applied to the problems of 

 clinical medicine methods which we now recognize as those of experi- 

 mental pathology. Still pathology was not a science; it was not sys- 

 tematized and it had no underlying principle. The systematization of 

 pathological anatomy came through Eokitansky^ (180-^1878) and the 

 underlying principle of pathology from Virchow in 1858. 



Eokitansky, the father of pathological anatomy, was an assistant to 

 Johann Wagner, later succeeding him in 1834 as prosector and finally 

 in 1844 as professor of pathological anatomy at Vienna. Wagner had 

 encouraged the application to pathology of the methods of anatomy, 

 and the publication of Eokitansky's " Handbuch der pathologischen 

 Anatomic," completed in 1846 (one year before Virchow's " Archiv " 

 was founded), presented to the profession the results of a most thor- 

 ough study of the details of pathological anatomy. It is said that 

 Eokitansky performed, as the basis for his classifications, more than 

 thirty thousand autopsies. His position in pathology has been likened 

 to that of Linnaeus in botany. " Even to-day nothing can equal the 

 accuracy of Eokitansky's observations. There are few things he did 

 not see. When some lesion or combination of lesions seems entirely 



* A worthy predecessor of Eokitansky was Johann Fr. Meckel, whose 

 "Handbuch d. patholog. Anatomie" was published at Halle in 1804, the year 

 of Eokitansky's birth. 



