370 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ings and the scarcely less violent druggings with strong drugs have dis- 

 appeared. The patient is less harassed by his doctor, who is more con- 

 tent to assist the natural processes of recuperation as his knowledge of 

 applied physiology and hygiene teach him, rather than to thwart theni 

 and to lessen resistance as his predecessor often did a generation ago 

 when he knew no physiology and less hygiene. Still, the comparison 

 between the text-book of even forty years ago and one of the present 

 day shows a wonderful advance, all flowing from the use of the re- 

 search method in the intervening years, both in knowledge of the orig- 

 ins and in the treatments of the diseases. 



Time and space forbid going into details, but the whole of serum, 

 vaccine and organo-therapy were unknown, with the single exception of 

 vaccination for variola. Enteric fever has been separated from typhus, 

 but its etiology is still obscure, and, to a large extent as a consequence, 

 the mortality from it is fifteen to sixteen per cent., or quadruple present- 

 day figures, and it is one of the commonest of diseases. The cause of 

 diphtheria is unknown, although it is now recognized as a " contagious " 

 disease, and as yet research in bacteriology has supplied no cure for it. 

 The unity of the various forms of tuberculosis is unsuspected, the in- 

 fecting organism is unknown, and, as a result, it is not even recognized 

 as an infectious disease and heredity figures most strongly in a dubious 

 etiology leading up to a vacillating treatment. Pneumonia is not rec- 

 ognized as due to a microorganism, and is described as one of the 

 "idiopathic" diseases. The cause of syphilis, and its relationship to 

 tabes dorsalis, and general paralysis are unknown, and generally it may 

 be said that the causes of disease are either entirely unknown or errone- 

 ously given in at least three quarters of the very incomplete list of dis- 

 eases that are classified and described. 



This, after all the centuries, was the doleful position of medical sci- 

 ence in the year 1876, when suddenly light began to shine upon it, 

 brought not by the agency of any member of the medical profession, 

 but by a physiological chemist, and he was led to his great discovery, 

 not in an attempt to solve some problem of practical medicine, but by 

 scientific observations devoted to an apparently purely philosophical 

 critical research into the supposed origin of life in a particular way. 



It was the experimental or research method in biochemistry sup- 

 ported by physiological experiments on animals which in the hands of 

 Louis Pasteur laid the foundations of true knowledge, and transformed 

 medicine from what has been described above into the glorious, living, 

 evolving science that we possess to-day. 



The men who fought side by side with Pasteur in his famous 

 struggle against orthodoxy in medicine as represented by the leading 

 physicians and surgeons of the period between 1860 and 1880 were 

 mainly chemists, biologists and physiologists, such as Claude Bernard, 

 Paul Bert, J. B. Dumas, Biot, Belard and Sainte-Claire Deville, in his 



