332 THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE. [LECT. 



mortem investigations have supplied physicians with 

 a clear basis upon which to rest the classification of 

 diseases, and with unerring tests of the accuracy or 

 inaccuracy of their diagnoses. 



If men could be satisfied with pure knowledge, the 

 extreme precision with which, in these days, a sufferer 

 may be told what is happening, and what is likely to 

 happen, even in the most recondite parts of his bodily 

 frame, should be as satisfactory to the patient as it is 

 to the scientific pathologist who gives him the infor- 

 mation. But I am afraid it is not; and even the 

 practising physician, while nowise underestimating 

 the regulative value of accurate diagnosis, must often 

 lament that so much of his knowledge rather prevents 

 him from doing wrong than helps him to do right. 



A scorner of physic once said that nature and dis- 

 ease may be compared to two men fighting, the doctor 

 to a blind man with a club, who strikes into the melee, 

 sometimes hitting the disease, and sometimes hitting 

 nature. The matter is not mended if you suppose the 

 blind man's hearing to be so acute that he can register 

 every stage of the struggle, and pretty clearly predict 

 how it will end. He had better not meddle at all, 

 until his eyes are opened until he can see the exact 

 position of the antagonists, and make sure of the 

 effect of his blows. But that which it behoves the 

 physician to see, not, indeed, with his bodily eye, but 

 with clear, intellectual vision, is a process, and the 

 chain of causation involved in that process. Disease, 

 as we have seen, is a perturbation of the normal 

 activities of a living body, and it is, and must remain, 



