RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 559 



And again he says : 



At that time there were many among the younger doctors who, in despair 

 about their science, gave up all therapeutics, and took to empiricism. 



This was from a scientific man^ who had much to do with the 



changes about to come, and perhaps somewhat biased ; but we have the 



view of Stieglitz, an " old and learned practitioner," expressed in IS-iO : 



German medicine was sunk so low and is so emasculated as to require any 

 sort of shaking up. Whatever gives it a new direction will be wholesome, though 

 new errors or possibilities may result therefrom. 



But, to continue Helmholtz's remarks : 



The right kind of work brought forth its fruits much sooner than many 

 had hoped. The introduction of mechanical notions into the theories of cir- 

 culation and respiration, a better insight into the phenomena of heat, the more 

 minutely elaborated physiology of the nerves, speedily produced practical results 

 of the greatest importance; the microscopical examination of parasitic tissues, 

 the stupendous development of pathological anatomy, led irresistibly from 

 nebulous theories to real facts. 



As Helmholtz was born in 1821 his point of view is that of one who 

 saw both the old and the new; the old in his student days, the new as 

 one of those who labored to bring about the change. His view is largely 

 that of the scientist, but we have fortunately the reminiscences of 

 another, a practitioner of medicine, who labored as a student of medi- 

 cine in those days of rapid change. I refer to Abraham Jacobi, our 

 own Jacobi, " the father of pediatrics," who studied, as he tells us in 

 his McGill address, " in three universities from 1847 to 1851, in Griefs- 

 wald, Gottingen and Bonn." Referring to this period, he says : 



I have lived under the eyes of and contemporaneously with great men and 

 during the development of modern medicine . . . not as a cooperator, it is true, 

 but as an interested looker-on, when great things happened. 



Aside from Vienna, where Eokitansky taught, there were 



only two places in all Germany in which pathological anatomy could be learned. 

 One of them was Wiirzburg, there was Virchow, the other was Gottingen, there 

 was Frerichs. So to Gottingen I went in search of pathological anatomy. . . . 

 At the same time I looked for the advantages of chemical laboratory work under 

 Wiggers and Wohler. 



Among the scientific happenings of Jacobi's first medical year 

 (1847) are the following: Helmholtz's address on the conservation of 

 energy; the use of ether anesthesia in obstetric practise by Hamner 

 and in dentistry by Delabarre (first used by Warren at Boston in 

 1846); Liebig's researches on meats; the employment of prismatic 

 glasses by Kreke and Bonders ; the first use of chloroform by Simpson ; 

 the employment of Duchenne of faradization in the treatment of 

 paralysis; the discovery of unstriped muscle fibers by Kolliker and the 

 studies by Semmelweis of the etiology of fever in puerperal women. 



Among the events of the next five years, during three of which he 

 was a student and two a political prisoner, Jacobi mentions : Bunsen's 

 quantitative analysis of urea, the founding of spectral analysis, the use 



