616 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



prejudiced, thoughtful people some idea of the magnitude and 

 scope of medicine and its importance to human and to all animal 

 life, together with some faint conception of the moral forces im- 

 pelling to the pursuit of those sciences which underlie medicine, 

 in the light of these ideas the vivisection question would wholly 

 disappear. 



More than two hundred and fifty years ago, in the town of 

 Schaffhausen, a German anatomist was engaged in studying the 

 anatomy of the human body. The people loathed him as one pos- 

 sessed of the devil. They told him, in the words of an old super- 

 stition, that the stain of human blood he could never wash from 

 his hands. His reply was, " I can wash the blood stains from my 

 hands with a basin of water, but the stain of ignorance of anatomy 

 can not be washed from the medical profession with all the water 

 of the Rhine and the ocean." * Wepf er spoke of anatomy. Anat- 

 omy must precede physiology and pathology, as the structure must 

 precede the function it is to perform. Thus Anatomy must pre- 

 pare the way for physiology, and to some extent she has fulfilled her 

 mission. But were a Wepf er to arise now, he would say, " The 

 stain of ignorance of physiology can not be washed away with all 

 the water of five oceans." I doubt, however, whether a modern 

 Wepfer would lay the burden of blame at the door of the medical 

 profession. It is everyday talk that physicians must lower their 

 practice to the ignorance and prejudice of their patients. The 

 idea of " magic " cures is still too deeply rooted in the average 

 mind, and a doctor must * dose " a large proportion of his patients 

 to satisfy this craving. At no time in the history of medicine has 

 there been such a craze for patent medicines as now, and in no 

 country is the situation so bad as in our own. We are the laugh- 

 ingstock of all Europe in this regard. In Germany apothecaries 

 are prosecuted for advertising and selling American patent medi- 

 cines. What hope, then, is there for rational medicine in a coun- 

 try that spends yearly hundreds of millions for worthless or 

 harmful " patent medicines " and quack doctors, and but a very 

 few paltry thousands for the advancement of physiology and 

 worse still, among a people who are as completely and just as in- 

 telligently satisfied with quack nostrums as men were in the dark 

 ages with amulets and signatures, the moss scraped from a human 

 skull, the powder of dried toads, or the hair of a saint ? \ In a na- 

 tion of popular rule, the only hope seems to lie in scientific educa- 

 tion of the people. How this is to be attained is a most difficult 

 problem. The people will not educate themselves. Against such 



* Rudolf Virchow. Archiv fiir pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie, vol. clxxxv, 

 p. 375, Berlin, 1881. 



f George F. Fort. History of Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, London, 1883. 



