400 PHYSIOLOGY 



of a disease became inseparably coupled with that which was found 

 in the body after it succumbed to the disease. When, at a later period, 

 physiology also became a precise science, it broke away at the very 

 onset of its regeneration from medicine; it wished to be exact, to be 

 a pure science, and thus gained no influence upon pathology, which 

 it refused to study. So it came about that medicine is made up 

 of a complete knowledge of the anatomical conditions after death, of 

 nearly a complete morphology of the symptoms of the disease during 

 life, but of only a vague, makeshift mechanical interpretation of the 

 functional disturbances during the actual course of the disease. The 

 last decades have seen the birth and marvelous growth of the know- 

 ledge of the etiology of disease. Animal and vegetable invaders were 

 recognized as the essential cause of many diseases. But the study of 

 the functions of the body whose lot it is to grapple with the invaders 

 received only a secondary attention, and that again essentially from 

 morphological quarters. At the present time still more knowledge 

 is being diligently added to the stores of medical wisdom. Chemistry 

 has taken a powerful hand in the studies of physiology and pathology, 

 and is attaining brilliant results. But we should not be misled. The 

 studies are essentially morphological in their nature. It is physiolog- 

 ical and pathological chemistry, and but very little chemical physio- 

 logy and pathology. Even if the hopes of the new school of brilliant 

 chemical investigators will, indeed, be realized, viz., that in a not far- 

 off future they will know the structure of proteids and all their con- 

 stituent bodies, it will be the knowledge of the proteids of the dead 

 bodies, it will be a brilliant post-mortem chemistry. Living animal 

 matter, however, is something, else than dead proteids, as living 

 plants are something else than carbohydrates, although the know- 

 ledge of the latter has already reached the ideal stage where some of 

 them can be produced synthetically. No, a study of life, normal and 

 abnormal, is essentially a study of energy, of function; of course, the 

 knowledge of the underlying morphology, dead or living, is a pre- 

 requisite for such studies. And let me state right here that there seems 

 to be a difference in the make-up of the human mind with regard to the 

 different studies. Some are more apt and better endowed to grapple 

 with the problems of energy, and others, again, have natural talents 

 for the science of morphology. Only a few, however, have the good 

 fortune of becoming educated in the lines of their natural endow- 

 ments, and still fewer have the genius to work out their natural des- 

 tinies against all odds, against all education and training. Now the 

 men who did and who now do the original work in the medical sciences 

 received their training in the studies of medicine, four fifths of which 

 is profoundly developed, magnificent morphology. We cannot won- 

 der, therefore, that most of the original contributions to the medical 

 sciences are essentially of a morphological character. Even in the very 



