lOAVA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 19 



gen ray, used by physicians in almost every town of size 

 in Iowa within less than half a decade of its discovery. 



The debt of the healing art to the sciences of the bio- 

 logic group is so vast that I will select but one, bacteriol- 

 ogy, for illustration. It is to no lucky chance that the 

 discovery is due of man's most subtle and deadly foes, the 

 bacteria. The work of Pasteur, the pioneer, and of his 

 illustrious followers, is marked by the most thorough and 

 painstaking investigation, and the most searching and 

 rigid tests. It is by the application of the scientific 

 method that the enemy has been unmasked, his ambus- 

 cades and chosen places for assault discovered, and ra- 

 tional methods for his destruction demonstrated. It is 

 men of science who have organized the victory of medi- 

 cine today over diphtheria, rabies, and the plague, over 

 the venom of the snake and all the diseases to which 

 serum therapathy is successfully applied. And where the 

 bacteriologist cannot as yet supply a specific for disease, he 

 can often point the w^ay to its prevention. When the access 

 to the human system of the germs of typhoid and chol- 

 era by drinking water is demonstrated, Hamburg builds its 

 filter beds at a cost of $2,280,000, and Chicago expends $83,- 

 000,000 upon the drainage canal. And so with the great 

 wdiite plague, tubercular consumption. Science has proved 

 the lurking-places of the contagion in the sputum, and its 

 carriage in the air we breathe, and reinforced by the high 

 moral sense of our people, she is fast making it as impos- 

 sible for the consumptive to spit on the pavement unhin- 

 dered as for the small pox patient to walk unarrested down 

 our streets. 



And who can estimate the number of lives now saved in 

 each generation by aseptic surgery? So long as putrefac- 

 tion was held, as by Liebig, to be due to the action of the 

 oxygen of the air, no remedy for it could be suggested. 

 But when once its bacterial origin was proven, the step 

 was inevitable to those precautions which have rendered 

 safe and successful the marvellous operations of modern 

 surgery. 



