THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE. 799 



causes of disease by anatomy, but himself traveled wonderfully far 

 upon the road. Bichat, discriminating the grosser constituents of the 

 organs and parts of the body one from another, pointed out the direc- 

 tion which modern research must take ; until, at length, histology, a 

 science of yesterday, as it seems to many of us, has carried the work 

 of Morgagni as far as the microscope can take us, and has extended 

 the realm of pathological anatomy to the limits of the invisible 

 world. 



Thanks to the intimate alliance of morphology with medicine, the 

 natural history of disease has, at the present day, attained a high de- 

 gree of perfection. Accurate regional anatomy has rendered prac- 

 ticable the exploration of the most hidden parts of the organism, and 

 the determination during life of morbid changes in them ; anatomical 

 and histological post-mortem investigations have supplied physicians 

 with a clear basis upon which to rest the classification of diseases, and 

 with unerring tests of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their diagnoses. 



If men could be satisfied with pure knowledge, the extreme preci- 

 sion witTi which in these days a sufferer may be told what is happen- 

 ing, and what is likely to happen, even in the most recondite parts of 

 his bodily frame, should be as satisfactory to the patient as it is to the 

 scientific pathologist who gives him the information. But I am afraid 

 it is not ; and even the practicing physician, while nowise underesti- 

 mating the regulative value of accurate diagnosis, must often lament 

 that so much of his knowledge rather prevents him from doing wrong, 

 than helps him to do right. 



A scorner of physic once said that nature and disease may be com- 

 pared to two men fighting, the doctor to a blind man with a club, who 

 strikes into the melee, sometimes hitting the disease, and sometimes 

 hitting nature. The matter is not mended if you suppose the blind 

 man's hearing to be so acute that he can register every stage of the 

 struggle and pretty clearly predict how it will end. He had better not 

 meddle at all, until his eyes are oj^ened until he can see the exact 

 position of the antagonists, and make sure of the effect of his blows. 

 But that which it behooves the physician to see, not indeed with his 

 bodily eye, but with clear intellectual vision, is a process, and the chain 

 of causation involved in that process. Disease, as we have seen, is a 

 perturbation of the normal activities of a living body ; and it is, and 

 must remain, unintelligible, so long as we are ignorant of the nature 

 of these normal activities. ' In other words, there could be no real sci- 

 ence of pathology until the science of physiology had reached a degree 

 of perfection unattained, and indeed unattainable, until quite recent 

 times. 



So far as medicine is concerned, I am not sure that physiology, such 

 as it was down to the time of Harvey, might as well not have existed. 

 Nay, it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, within the memory of 

 living men, justly renowned practitioners of medicine and surgery 



