XI7 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE 355 



erring tests of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their 

 diagnoses. 



If men could be satisfied with pure knowledge, 

 the extreme precision with which, in these days, 

 a sufferer may be told what is happening, and 

 what is likely to happen, even in the most recon- 

 dite parts of his bodily frame, should be as satis- 

 factory 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 practising 

 physician, while nowise under-estimating the regu- 

 lative value of accurate diagnosis, must often la- 

 ment that so much of his knowledge rather pre- 

 vents him from doing wrong than helps him to 

 do right. 



A scorner of physic once said that nature and 

 disease may be compared 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 opened, until he can see the exact po- 

 sition 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. 



