368 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the employment of any course of physical or chemical treatment, or of 

 anything in the whole of his armamentarium? Yet the public are 

 rarely told any of these wholesale truths but are rather left to speculate 

 that each medical and surgical fact sprang forth as a kind of revelation 

 in the inner consciousness of some past genius in medicine or surgery, 

 who, in some occult way, knew of his own certain foreknowledge what 

 would be the definite effect of some remedy or course of treatment before 

 he tried it for the first time on a patient, or perhaps had the ethical con- 

 science and genuine humanity to test it on a lower animal before he ad- 

 ministered it to man. 



It may, in short, be taken as an axiom of medical science that every- 

 thing of value in medicine and surgery has arisen from the applica- 

 tions of experimental research. Nor can future advance be made by any 

 other method than the research method. It is true that accident may 

 teach occasionally, as it did, for example, in the dreadful burns un- 

 wittingly inflicted on themselves and patients by the early experiment- 

 ers in X-ray therapy and diagnosis. But accident is only the most 

 blundering type of experimentation, and results obtained by its chance 

 agency do not really invalidate the universal law that man only learns 

 by experience or, in other words, by research. Research is, after all, 

 only the acquisition of fresh experience by the trained expert, usually 

 led on to his experiment by inductance from other known facts. 



It has been said above that all that is valuable in medical science has 

 been acquired by research; the converse may now be pointed out, that 

 much that was valueless, dangerous, and even disgusting in medicine in 

 earlier days was incorporated into the medical lore of the time and 

 often remained there for generations stealing lives by thousands be- 

 cause physicians had not yet adopted the research method, and so based 

 their practise upon ignorant and unfounded convention. It is notice- 

 able in literature that up to somewhere in the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century physicians and surgeons were often as a class looked 

 upon by scholars and educated people with a certain amount of con- 

 tempt. There were notable and fine exceptions in all ages, but, taken 

 as a whole, the profession of medicine was not held in that high esteem 

 and admiration that it is amongst all classes to-day. Take, for ex- 

 ample, Burns's picture of Dr. Hornbook or Sterne's account of Dr. Slop 

 in " Tristram Shandy," and similar examples in plenty are to be found 

 in the Continental literature. The reason for the change is to be found 

 in the comparative growth of medical science as a result of the research 

 method. The physicians of those days were very often ignorant quacks 

 employing the most disgusting and dangerous remedies, or methods of 

 treatment, based upon no experimental knowledge and handed own in 

 false tradition from ignorant master to ignorant and often almost il- 

 literate apprentice. It is only necessary to peruse the volumes written 



