MEDICINE AND MORALS 



progress may be appreciated by recalling 

 that till the middle of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury medical knowledge was almost wholly 

 empirical, based upon the old humoral 

 pathology and weighted with abject rever- 

 ence for authority. For a long time im- 

 provement was slow, but since the clinical 

 thermometer was introduced and bacterio- 

 logical science began to be utilized in the 

 medical field, betterment has gone on by 

 leaps and bounds. 



4. The still more remarkable progress 

 of surgery, even aside from anesthesia and 

 asepsis; the art of applying these and the 

 various other arts connected with surgery, 

 e. g., the invention and use of clever instru- 

 ments such as those of mechanical surgery, 

 probably constituting, all taken together, as 

 great an advance in surgery as either anes- 

 thesia or asepsis. 



5. The system of improved hospitals, to- 

 day the most Christian characteristic of 

 Christendom, owing its existence mainly to 

 the medical fraternity. If physicians have 

 not furnished the funds for it they have pro- 



357 



