364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pared to have wider vision and abandon old theories and beliefs in the 

 new-born light that makes the world better to-day than it was yester- 

 day, and that also will show tilings up to our mental vision more clearly 

 to-morrow than they stand out to-day. To the members of any great 

 craft, or profession, or religious order, this scientific outlook which ac- 

 cepts as fundamental a progressive world and insists that its votaries 

 should adapt their lives to such a doctrine, is peculiarly difficult of as- 

 similation. Routine fixes all men, and so when any new discovery ap- 

 pears to demand change from that order to which the mind has become 

 accustomed, it is immediately looked upon with suspicion, and there 

 being little plasticity of mind remaining, it is rejected as heretical or 

 revolutionary after but scanty critical examination. The cry of the craft 

 in danger has been used efficaciously on many occasions since the days of 

 the Ephesian silversmiths, nor is such a cry at once to be set down to 

 pure selfishness. A craft is often worth preserving long after the forces 

 which have called it into being have commenced to slumber, and con- 

 servatism of this type is at times an important factor in social progress. 

 However, there are certain limits which must not be surpassed, room 

 must be made by adaptation for the new knowledge, or it will establish 

 a craft of its own iconoclastic to much worth preserving in the older 

 system. 



It is important to insist upon these limitations, because a too reac- 

 tionary spirit abroad in medicine between 1860 and 1880 prevented the 

 world from benefiting from those remarkable discoveries by Pasteur and 

 their proposed applications by Lister, which laid the foundations of 

 modern medicine and modern surgery. These pioneers of the new age 

 in medical science had to wage for many years a stern and bitter fight 

 against the strong forces of ignorance and prejudice. But for this il- 

 logical resistance by men who would not even test the new discoveries, 

 and instead spent their time in sneering at the new geniuses who had 

 leadership to give the world, France and Germany would have been 

 saved many thousands of brave lives in the great war of 1870-71. Even 

 thereafter, the slow struggle continued of the few who knew against 

 the many who refused to be taught, and a perusal of any orthodox 

 text-book of medicine published between 1875-80 — that is, more than 

 a decade after Pasteups great discovery — will show that the etiology 

 of scarcely a single infectious disease had become known, and that med- 

 ical science was, for example, as ignorant of the nature of tuberculosis 

 as we are to-day of the nature of carcinoma. Take, as an example, the 

 following quotation from a well-known text-book of the theory and 

 practise of medicine published in 1876: "It is now, however, generally 

 admitted that tubercle is no mere deposit, but, on the contrary, a living 

 growth as much as sarcoma and carcinoma are living growths." The 

 tubercles were the only initial lesion observed, the infecting organism 

 was entirely unknown, and the pathologists of this comparatively re- 



