110 Transactions of the Society. 



periods when internal medicine was lethargic and even stationary, 

 attributes this to the fact that to the surgeon the application of 

 scientific methods (observation together with close, repeated, and 

 careful reasoning from ascertained facts as recommended by 

 Hippocrates) was not only more necessary than to the Pnysician, 

 but more readily achieved. The lesions he had to treat were patent 

 to all, and the cause of them was so often known and so frequently 

 of traumatic origin, that rational and effective treatment was more 

 easy of application, and satisfactory results more readily obtained. 

 Moreover, what was evident to the surgeon was also laid bare to the 

 eye of the passer-by : it was not easy to hush up failures and hide 

 mistakes. In internal medicine, on the other hand, excuse might 

 be made by the physician that he could not expose the lesiuns with 

 which he had to grapple, and that, in many cases, it was not possible 

 to trace the causes or even the course of the disease. Hippocrates, 

 indeed, insisted upon the need of careful observation and classifica- 

 tion of symptoms, and the tracing and following out of the action 

 of remedies ; and from time to time there have been those who have 

 come back to his first principles in carrying on the study of such 

 diseases as are relegated to the domain of internal medicine ; but 

 for long — indeed, until the era of the Microscope — the physician 

 remained the slave of convention, bound by the crude and ill- 

 founded hypotheses of men, who, instead of studying nature, relied 

 on the " authority " of those as ill-informed as themselves. They 

 treated disease as an entity in itself and something apart from the 

 patient. Custom, popular superstitions, religious susceptibilities, 

 were, through the middle ages, all against the handling or dissection 

 of the dead body, and although Vesalius and Eustachius and others, 

 now and again, made careful dissections and thorough examination 

 of the bodies of patients, no sustained and systematic account was 

 kept of the condition of the organs and tissues of patients who had 

 succumbed to disease, conditions that could be correlated with the 

 symptoms manifested during life. Then a first step was taken, and 

 post-mortem examinations were made on a considerable scale by 

 Antonio Benivieni, who died in 1502, and whose work " De abditis 

 causis morborum" was published posthumously in 1507. Allbutt 

 says of him : " Before Vesalius, before Eustachius, he opened the 

 bodies of the dead as deliberately and clear-sightedly as any patho- 

 logist in the spacious times of Baillie, Bright, and Addison." It was 

 not, however, until Giovanni Bittista Morg.igni (1682-1771), as 

 Professor in Padua, published his great work " De sedibus et causis 

 morborum " (1761) that the way was opened up for the microscopist. 

 There have been many great morbid anatomists since — Rukitansky, 

 Lancereaux, Virchow, Wilks, Hamilton, Hebb, Shattock, and others 

 — but morbid anatomy was but the basis of pathology, and not until 

 the Microscope was called to the aid of the later of these workers 

 and others in the field of pathology was it possible to reach our 



