MODERN MEDICINE— THE CROSSROADS OF THE 

 SOCIAL AND THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES » 



By Chakles Austin Doan, B. S., M. D., F. A. C. P. 



In acknowledgiDg the honor you have done the section on medical 

 sciences in permitting one of its members to serve as your president 

 during the past year, may I say first of all that we interpret your action 

 as a recognition of the emergence of medical practice from an ancient 

 and honorable art into a modern, dynamic science of health. Disease 

 has existed on the earth as long as organic life has been known. The 

 archeologist, the geologist, the anthropologist, the explorer, have all 

 contributed affirmative evidence of this belief. The earliest inter- 

 pretable record dates back some 4% million years according to the 

 accepted geological calculation of time, and represents a form of 

 parasitism — fossil snails in the act of feeding on crinoids, a species of 

 sea lily. From that time on, as the fossil remains of the earth's 

 earliest inhabitants unfold the story of life before the advent of man, 

 there appears mute evidence of disease as revealed by skeletal abnor- 

 malities — fractures, carious teeth, bone necroses — in the now extinct 

 fishes and reptiles. The tsetse fly, today's deadly carrier of cattle 

 plague and African sleeping sickness, has been identified in fossil 

 formations dating back a million and a half years. 



Man's arrival on the scene seems to have been greeted by the same 

 onslaught of disease that met the various forms of plant and animal 

 life which preceded him. The "Java man," placed by anthropologists 

 as the precursor of the human race with an estimated age of 500,000 

 years, shows pathological exostoses of the femur. The "Piltdown 

 man," with an estimated age of 100,000 years and considered the 

 oldest human skeleton yet discovered, has an acromegalic skull. The 

 "Neanderthal man," spanning 75,000 years of elapsed time, has sug- 

 gested rickets to some anthropologists. 



The history and scientific beginnings of medicine extend back to the 

 ancient Egyptians of the very first civilization of which we have 

 written record, some 30 centuries before the rise of the better known 

 Hippocratic school at Cos in Greece. The Smith Surgical Papyrus 

 and the Ebers Medical Papyrus, ancient hieroglyphic records of the 



1 Presidential address delivered before the Ohio Academy of Science, May 14, 1937. Reprinted by per- 

 mission from The Ohio Journal of Science, vol. 37, No. 4, July 1937. 



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