BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE’ 
By Asa CRAWFORD CHANDLER 
Professor of Biology, The Rice Institute 
My subject this afternoon is “Biology and Medicine,” but I think 
a more accurate wording would be “Medicine and Other Phases of 
Biology,” for to my mind medicine is a branch of biology. Webster’s 
Dictionary defines medicine as the science and art dealing with the 
prevention, cure, or alleviation of disease. Biology is the science of 
life. Disease might well be defined as life out of balance, and is in a 
strict sense a biological process. Whether it be an attack by micro- 
organisms, or improper functioning of glands, or congenital mis- 
formation or maladjustment, or injury by poison or bullets, disease 
processes are in the last analysis nothing more than cells, tissues, 
or organs that have suffered injury and so not only fail to perform 
their normal functions but in most cases interfere with the normal 
functions of other parts, more often than not of the entire body. 
Of the two great divisions of medicine dealing respectively with 
treatment and with prevention, the former is much the older. It is 
far easier to observe the effects of treatment on a person suffering 
from a malady than it is to understand why someone else escaped 
it. Some knowledge of curative or alleviative medicine was possessed 
by our cave-dwelling ancestors; in fact, it is instinctive in many 
lower animals. It gradually grew up as a sort of folklore from a 
slow process of trial and error, added to the instinctive knowledge ac- 
quired from prehuman ancestors. 
With the growth of belief in the supernatural, by which man satis- 
fied his developing desire to explain things, medicine became largely 
theological. Priests and physicians were one. They conceived disease 
as the work of devils, gods, or spirits which had to be appeased by 
sacrifices, confused or circumvented by charms or incantations, evicted 
by emetics, cathartics, or bloodletting, or enticed to escape by means 
of holes in the skull, nasty medicine, or other devices. It is since the 
days of our Pilgrim Fathers that we have learned that it is more effec- 
tive to control typhoid and cholera by boiling water than by boiling 
witches. 
Although belief in the instrumentality of demons and witches in 
causing disease persisted for a long time, since Hippocrates more en- 
1 Public lecture delivered at The Rice Institute in the spring of 1943. Reprinted by per- 
mission from The Rice Institute Pamphlet, vol. 30, No. 4, October 1943. 
317 
