2io TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



difficulty, and in most instances in opposition to the traditions of the 

 profession. Such independent effort, though most prominent in the 

 period previous to the year 1800, always has had and always will have 

 a place in medicine. This is seen in the efforts of the individual, even 

 after medicine was influenced by its ancillary sciences and, indeed, in 

 the days of organized laboratory effort. In this connection, one recalls 

 Sir George Baker's demonstration that a form of colic, epidemic in 

 character, occurring in Devonshire, England, was to be explained as a 

 poisoning by lead; Captain Cook's conquest of scurvy; Auenbrugger's 

 invention of the method of percussion; Laennec's invention of the 

 stethoscope; the theory announced independently by Holmes and by 

 Semmelweis of the transmission of puerperal fever and many other 

 independent efforts in the practise of surgery and medicine, as those 

 with which we associate the names of Pinel, McDowell, O'Dwyer and 

 Trudeau. 



Modern effort in research in medicine, however, as in science gen- 

 erally, is, it must be admitted, organized laboratory effort, and upon 

 this type of effort present-day progress would seem to depend. Never- 

 theless, the individual is as important as ever, for "it goes without 

 saying that laboratory buildings alone, even when adequately equipped 

 and with a liberal maintenance budget, are far less important than the 

 men who work in them" (Barker), but the laboratory now offers to 

 the individual, with original conceptions or special talents, advantages, 

 facilities and opportunities which, by aiding and supplementing the 

 work of the individual, render isolated effort unnecessary, time-con- 

 suming and often futile. 



Under the second head, the influence of physics, chemistry and 

 biology, fall such men as the English physicists and chemists and the 

 French academicians — Boyle, Cavendish, Priestley, Galvani, Faraday, 

 Tyndall, Lavoisier, Gay-Lussac and Berzelius. A more direct influence 

 is seen in the entrance of Pasteur, a chemist, into the field of etiology ; 

 of Ehrlich, a physician, but chemically trained, into the field of im- 

 munity and specific chemical affinities; and of Metchnikoff, applying 

 the methods of the biologist to the problems of pathology. Likewise 

 Liebig and Wohler and organic chemistry; Hoppe-Seyler and physiolog- 

 ical chemistry; Arrhenius and physical chemistry, Darwinism, Men- 

 delism, all have had their influence, and the methods and views they 

 represent have been taken over by medicine and applied to the solution 

 of its problems. 



The influence of physics and chemistry in establishing the third 

 factor — organized laboratory effort in special fields of medicine — we 

 have seen in the beginnings of laboratory research in the second quarter 

 of the past century. Virchow at the time he was urging the establish- 



