346 AIM AND PROGRESS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



medicine. Both have received an impetus, such as had not 

 been felt for thousands of years, from the time that they seri- 

 ously adopted the method of physical science, the exact observa- 

 tion of phenomena and experiment. As a practising physician, 

 in my earlier days, I can personally bear testimony to this. I 

 was educated at a period when medicine was in a transitional 

 stage, when the minds of the most thoughtful and exact were 

 filled with despair. It was not difficult to recognise that the old 

 predominant theorising methods of practising medicine were al- 

 together untenable ; with these theories, however, the facts on 

 which they had actually been founded had become so inextric- 

 ably entangled that they also were mostly thrown overboard. 

 How a science should be built up anew had already been seen in 

 the case of the other sciences ; but the new task assumed colossal 

 proportions; few steps had been taken towards accomplishing 

 it, and these first efforts were in some measure but crude and 

 clumsy. We need feel no astonishment that many sincere and 

 earnest men should at that time have abandoned medicine as 

 unsatisfactory, or on principle given themselves over to an ex- 

 aggerated empiricism. 



But well-directed efforts produced the right result more 

 quickly even than many had hoped for. The application of the 

 mechanical ideas to the doctrine of circulation and respiration, 

 the better interpretation of thermal phenomena, the more re- 

 fined physiological study of the nerves, soon led to practical re- 

 sults of the greatest importance ; microscopic examination of 

 parasitic structures, the stupendous development of pathological 

 anatomy, irresistibly led from nebulous theories to reality. We 

 found that we now possessed a much clearer means of distinguish- 

 ing, and a clearer insight into the mechanism of the process of 

 disease than the beats of the pulse, the urinary deposit, or the 

 fever type of older medical science had ever given us. If I 

 might name one department of medicine in which the influence of 

 the scientific method has been, perhaps, most brilliantly displayed, 

 it would be in ophthalmic medicine. The peculiar constitution of 

 the eye enables us to apply physical modes of investigation as 

 well in functional as in anatomical derangements of the living 



