HOUSE-SURGEON AT THE CHARITE 25 



the development of medicine were fast approaching their end. 

 The methods were rejected, and the facts as well, and it was 

 seen that medical science, like all the other sciences, had to 

 be reconstructed. After physics and chemistry first shaped 

 themselves on scientific lines in France in consequence of the 

 epoch-making labours of Coulomb and Lavoisier, Mitscherlich 

 and Liebig established chemistry as a science in Germany, 

 while Ohm, Franz Neumann, Gauss, and Wilhelm Weber 

 built up methods of experimental and mathematical physics 

 upon a solid foundation. Yet it required a titanic labour 

 to transfer these principles of methodic investigation from 

 inorganic to organic Nature. 



After Ernst Heinrich Weber had demanded that vital 

 phenomena should be explained in terms of physical processes, 

 Johannes Miiller endeavoured in all his physiological work 

 to clear the way for inductive methods of investigation, and 

 to push deductive reasoning and metaphysical conceptions 

 more and more into the background. But he could not 

 emancipate himself from the notion of a separate, individual, 

 vital force, distinct from the chemical and physical forces 

 working within the organism, and capable of binding and 

 loosing the action of the same. This is only abolished by 

 death ; the forces which it restrained are then set free, and 

 produce corruption and putrefaction; the vital force has vanished, 

 and is not replaced, nor converted into any other perceptible 

 form of energy. Miiller did not attempt to disguise the in- 

 consistency of his position, and as a result the four gifted 

 young investigators, Briicke, du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, 

 and Virchow, were all striving to develop a logical and unified 

 physiology according to the principles of exact investigation. 

 Each sought to abolish the notion of vital force from the 

 department of physiology which he regarded as his own, and 

 to cultivate physiology as a branch of physics and chemistry. 



But, in the mind of Helmholtz, the conflict between realistic 

 and metaphysical principles had become a resolute fight 

 against the dominating ideas in a wider field than physiology : 

 a vanishing vital force for which nothing was substituted 

 appeared to him a physical paradox a disappearance of 

 energy and matter was unthinkable. He had never heard 

 a mathematical lecture, but the Pepiniere possessed the works 



