40 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 



content only to see. But at last came the age of the 

 hand the thinking, devising, planning hand ; the hand 

 as an instrument of the mind, now reintroduced into 

 the world in a modest little monograph of seventy-two 

 pages, from which we may date the beginning ot 

 experimental medicine. 



No great discovery in science is ever without a corre- 

 sponding influence on medical thought, not always 

 evident at first, and apt to be characterized by the 

 usual vagaries associated with human effort. Very 

 marked in each generation has been the change wrought 

 in the conceptions of disease and in its treatment by 

 epoch-making discoveries as to the functions of the 

 body. We ourselves are deeply involved to-day in 

 toxins and antitoxins, in opsonins, tulases, and extracts 

 as a direct result of the researches in bacteriology and 

 in internal secretion. There were sanguine souls in 

 Harvey's day, who lamented with Floyer that the dis- 

 covery had not brought great and general innovations 

 into the whole practice of physic. But had the old 

 Litchfield physician lived he would have seen the rise 

 of a school based directly upon the studies of Harvey 

 and Sanctorius, the brilliant reasonings of Descartes 

 and the works of Bellini and Borelli. The mechanical 

 school rose in its pride on solid foundations which ap- 

 pealed to practical men with singular force. Very soon 

 that ' beatific epitome of creation ', man, was ' marked 

 out like a spot of earth or a piece of timber with rules 

 and compasses', and the medical terminology of the 

 day became unintelligible to the older practitioners who 

 could make nothing of the 'wheels and pulley, wedges, 

 levers, screws, cords, canals and cisterns, sieves and 

 strainers', and they cracked their jokes on 'angles, 

 cylinders, celerity, percussion, resistance, and such-like 



