HENRY JACOB BIGELOW, 343 



secrets of disease and its remedies. Observe all the facts in a case, 

 in a hundred or a thousand cases ; tabulate them, add, subtract, mul- 

 tiply, divide them, and the laws of pathology and therapeutics will 

 come out in your sums and quotients as inevitably as a clerk's balance 

 at the end of his account-book. Dr. Elisha Bartlett's " Philosophy 

 of Medical Science," published in 1844, presented the Numerical 

 Method in a form which might be thought to exclude the imaginative 

 element, and reduce the man of science to a mere statistician. 



Dr. Bigelow's essay was a vindication of the true office and the 

 importance of hypothesis. To illustrate his argument, he appealed to 

 the history of great discoverers and inventors, of Copernicus, of Kep- 

 ler, of Newton. "I am aware," he says, "that this position, namely, 

 that hypothesis is essential to the discovery of scientific truth, is not 

 recognized by many philosophers, especially in medical science of the 

 present day. Bacon himself, feeling that unfounded theory, gratui- 

 tous assertion, had been a stumbling-block to all preceding science, 

 was led to attaching too exclusive value to facts. ' We must not 

 imagine or invent,' he says, ' but discover the acts and properties of 

 nature.'" 



In the face of Bacon's proposition, in the presence of the chimpl- 

 ons of the statistical school of observers. Dr. Bigelow maintained 

 effectively and convincingly the true office of that higher faculty, 

 which, instead of counting columns of figures, sees, in virtue of its 

 special gift of insight, the hidden relations between a few facts re- 

 mote from one another to all appearance, but which, connected by 

 an hypothesis, are often verified by large observation, and become a 

 part of accepted knowledge or true science. 



It was not so much the originality of the thesis maintained by Dr. 

 Bigelow as the reasonable and forcible method by which he expounded 

 and illustrated it, and the peculiar fitness of his choice of a subject at 

 that particular time. He knew when to strike, as well as how to strike. 

 One of the most distinguished of our Boston practitioners said to me 

 that he almost regretted Dr. Bigelow's having given so much time to 

 special practical points, instead of applying himself to the larger prob- 

 lems of medical philosophy. I would not go so far as that, remem- 

 bering how much he accomplished in the improvement of mechanical 

 surgery, and the amount of human suffering which his inventive ge- 

 nius has relieved ; but, after reading this essay, one may be pardoned 

 for regretting that so good a thinker and reasoner was willing to allow 

 his skilful handiwork to usurp so large a po^-tion of his time and 

 labor. 



