XIV BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE 355 



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 recon- 

 dite parts of his bodily frame, should be as satis- 

 factory to the patient as it is to the scientific 

 pathologist who gives him the information. But 

 I am afraid it is not ; and even the practising 

 physician, while nowise under-estimating 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 

 disease may be compared to two men fighting, the 

 doctor to a blind man with a club, who strikes into 

 the mdlde, 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 



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