THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 3 



of treating the patient as well as his disease. But in a 

 broader, and surely a more natural, sense we may regard 

 medicine as a science. Pathology may, it is true, be 

 pursued as an abstract subject, but in real life it is 

 inseparable from medicine. Treatment and prevention 

 are so intimately bound up with a right understanding of 

 the nature of disease and of the laws which govern its 

 course, that I refuse to separate pathology and medicine. 

 It has too long been the fashion to limit the sphere of 

 pathology to the dead-house and the laboratory ; its field 

 is also at the bedside, and indeed I would assert that there 

 is no method of studying the natural history of disease 

 which pathology may not claim as its proper province. 



By Harvey's injunction I am to admonish you to seek 

 out the truths of Nature by observation and experiment. 

 These are two different ways of pursuing a subject, and 

 indeed the concrete sciences have been divided into the 

 " observational " and the " experimental ": anatomy is an 

 observational science, physiology an experimental one. 

 The observational sciences long preceded the experimental, 

 and in pathology and medicine, which partake of the 

 nature of both, the experimental method is of late growth. 



My aim is to trace, so far as I may in the allotted span 

 of time, the influences which have governed the growth 

 of our knowledge of disease, and to pursue them to their 

 beginnings rather than to record their final results. I 

 cannot, indeed, hope to say anything new ; I can only 

 endeavour to place before you the facts to be gathered 

 from literature in the way in which they group themselves 

 in my own mind. 



In the first place let me consider the conditions necessary 

 to the successful development of a science. The foremost 

 is liberty of thought. Unless man is free to reason from 

 his facts unhampered by deference to received opinion or 

 tradition, real progress in science is impossible. The 

 history of medicine abounds in evidence of this truth — 

 indeed Harvey's demonstration of the circulation offers a 

 striking instance. The second condition is accuracy of 



