ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 389 



mechanical devices which a physician with a clear 



mental vision did not require : moreover, the patient 



would thereby be degraded and treated as a machine. 



Feeling of the pulse was the most direct method of 



ascertaining the reactive power of the vital forces, and 



was delicately practised as the most important process. 



Elderly practitioners considered counting with a second- 



watch as hardly good taste : taking the temperature 



was not thought of. As to the eye-mirror, a highly 



celebrated surgical colleague told me he would never 



use the instrument, it being dangerous to throw brilliant 



light into suffering eyes : another declared the mirror 



might do well for oculists with poor sight; he himself 



possessed very good eyes and did not need it. ... A 



celebrated professor of physiology had an argument with 



his colleague in physics regarding the images in the 



eye. The professor of physics invited him of physiology 



to come and see the experiment. This was indignantly 



refused : a physiologist should have nothing to do with 



experiments, which might do well enough for a physicist." 



The first great attack upon the organic system of 



forces, upon the citadel of life, was made by chemistry, 



and was led by Lavoisier and the great school of chemists 



which continued his work. It consisted in the applica- 



tion of the theory of combustion, in which oxygen played 



such an important part, to the processes of respiration, 



14. 



Attack from 



of water, cold and warm, as a 

 remedy in fever and other diseases,' 

 London, 1797, "contains observa- 

 tions on the variations of the 

 body -temperature. . . . But these 

 attempts had little success. Not 

 till the middle of the nineteenth 



century was the importance of 

 medical thermometry recognised, 

 first through the classical work 

 of von Biirensprung (1851), then 

 through that of Traube, but 

 mainly through Wunderlich " 

 (ibid., p. 930). 



