340 THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE. 



determination, during life, of morbid changes in them ; 

 anatomical and histological post-mortem investigations 

 have supplied physicians with a clear basis upon which 

 to rest the classification of diseases, and with unerr- 

 ing tests of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their diag- 

 noses. 



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 information. 

 But I am afraid it is not ; and even the practising phy- 

 sician, 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 disease 

 may be compared to two men fighting, the doctor to a 

 blind man with a club, who strikes into the melee, some- 

 times 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, in- 

 deed, with his bodily eye, but with clear, intellectual 



