INTRODUCTORY SURVEY OF 

 FRENCH MEDICAL SCIENCE' 



To catch and imprison within the rigid symbols of 

 language the spirit of a people, as shown in any aspect 

 of their national life, so that the printed page may render 

 back to each reader a faithful picture, is as difficult as the 

 task of the painter, who would depict upon his canvas not 

 merely the features, but the essence of that inner life 

 which lies back of the ever-changing expression as a 

 central unity. Without this there can be no true portrait. 

 French medical science, in the modern sense, has a history 

 of a little more than one hundred years, of rapid growth, 

 of constantly increasing diversification, of shifting inter- 

 ests like the swing of the pendulum, often too far to one 

 side, then to the other. Nevertheless, through it all can be 

 traced something individual, a central stream of tendency 

 essentially French, which, impinged on from either side by 

 the flow of thought into it from other lands, has produced 

 the actual achievements in each of the lines of special en- 

 deavor that will be recounted in the chapters which follow. 

 Sympathy and imagination are perhaps the most char- 

 acteristic attributes of the French mind, as common-sense 

 and justice are of the Anglo-Saxon, and orderliness of 

 the German. Sympathy and imagination may, I believe, 

 be traced through the whole development of French 

 medicine. Wide and sympathetic interest in the relief of 

 human suffering through the advance of knowledge of 

 disease has been instinctive in their greatest scientists, 



1 [Drafting Committee: T. C. JANE WAY, Johns Hopkins Univer- 

 sity. ED.] 



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