ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 389 



mechanical devices which a physician with a clear 

 mental vision did not require : moreover, the patient 

 would thereby be degraded and treated as a machine. 

 Feeling of the pulse was the most direct method of 

 ascertaining the reactive power of the vital forces, and 

 was delicately practised as the most important process. 

 Elderly practitioners considered counting with a second- 

 watch as hardly good taste : taking the temperature 

 was not thought of. As to the eye-mirror, a highly 

 celebrated surgical colleague told me he would never 

 use the instrument, it being dangerous to throw brilliant 

 light into suffering eyes : another declared the mirror 

 might do well for oculists with poor sight; he himself 

 possessed very good eyes and did not need it. ... A 

 celebrated professor of physiology had an argument with 

 his colleague in physics regarding the images in the 

 eye. The professor of physics invited him of physiology 

 to come and see the experiment. This was indignantly 

 refused : a physiologist should have nothing to do with 

 experiments, which might do well enough for a physicist." 

 The first great attack upon the organic system of 

 forces, upon the citadel of life, was made by chemistry, 

 and was led by Lavoisier and the great school of chemists 

 which continued his work. It consisted in the applica- 

 tion of the theory of combustion, in which oxygen played 

 such an important part, to the processes of respiration, 



H. 



Attack from 



chemistry. 



of water, cold and warm, as a 

 remedy in fever and other diseases,' 

 London, 1797, "contains observa- 

 tions on the variations of the 

 body- temperature. . . . But these 

 attempts had little success. Not 

 till the middle of the nineteenth 



century was the importance of 

 medical thermometry recognised, 

 first through the classical work 

 of von Barensprung (1851), then 

 through that of Traube, but 

 mainly through Wunderlich " 

 (ibid., p. 930). 



