NATURE 



329 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 1S81 



VIVISECTION AND MEDICINE 



7"'HE International Medical Congress which has met 

 in London during the past week is the largest that 

 the world has ever seen. Medical men have assembled 

 from every part of the earth, and their meetings seem to 

 have been productive of general satisfaction. The objects 

 of such a Congress are twofold — first, to tell or hear of 

 new discoveries; and, second, to make men personally 

 acquainted who have previously been known to each other 

 only through their works. The latter is perhaps the 

 more important of the two, for it is not only a source of 

 very great pleasure, but of great profit, inasmuch as it 

 enables men to form a juster appreciation of the workers 

 in each department of medicine, and to avoid falling into 

 the error, very common at the present day, of placing the 

 observations and opinions of a mere tyro on a level with 

 those of the scientific veteran. The work of the Congress 

 has been divided into no less than fifteen sections, each 

 of which has taken up some special department of the 

 science or practice of medicine. For medicine is now not 

 merely an art. It is no longer practised by simple rule-of- 

 thumb. It is becoming, to some extent, a science, and 

 exact knowledge is beginning to supplant blind empiricism. 

 The means by which this change has been effected have been 

 admirably illustrated in the addresses of Prof. Virchow, 

 Mr. Simon, and Prof. Fraser. 



They are those of experiment 



It is by experiment alone that we are able to distinguish 

 between facts and fancies, between the ideas which arise 

 in men's minds and the realities of the external world. 

 It is in proportion as we bring our ideas into accordance 

 with facts, or, in other words, as we know instead of 

 supposing, that our power increases. Suppositions have 

 been the bete noire of medicine. They have constantly 

 misled men as to the causes, the nature, and the treat- 

 ment of disease, and so long as they were not subjected 

 to the test of experiment one supposition succeeded 

 another, only to be itself replaced by a third, no less f mci- 

 ful and no less delusive. This is the reason why the pro- 

 gress of medicine was formerly so slow, and it is only of 

 recent years, since the experimental method has been 

 employed, that medical knowledge has begun to acquire 

 any exactitude. As Prof. Virchow points out in his 

 address, the principle of modern medicine is localisation. 

 We localise the causes and seats of a disease, we localise 

 the action of remedies, and thus we are able to act with 

 certainty so far as our knowledge will carry us. If we 

 were able to localise certainly and define accurately the 

 causes and seats of disease and the action of our remedies, 

 we should possess a power to arrest or prevent disease 

 which would render death by old age the usual, instead 

 of as at present the exceptional, termination of huinan 

 life. The experiments by which exact knowledge is 

 obtained are, as Mr. Simon points out in his addres=, 

 of two kinds. " On the one hand we have the care- 

 fully pre-arranged and comparatively few experiments 

 which are done by us in our pathological laboratories, 

 and for the most part on other animals than man ; 

 on the other hand, we have the experiments which 

 Vol. xxiv. — No. 615 



accident does for us, and, above all, the incalculably 

 large amount of crude experiment which is popularly done 

 by man on man under our present ordinary conditions of 

 social life, and which gives us its results for our interpre- 

 tation." As an example of these two kinds of experiment, 

 Mr. Simon quotes the classical experiments to which, we 

 habitually refer when we think of guarding against the 

 danger of Asiatic cholera : " On the one side there are 

 the well-known scicntijic infection experiments of Prof. 

 Thiersch, and others following him, performed on a cer- 

 tain number of mice ; on the other hand, there are the 

 equally well-known popular experiments which, during 

 our two cholera epidemics of 1848-49 and 1853-54, were 

 performed on half a million of human beings, dwelling in 

 the southern districts of London, by certain commercial 

 comp:inie3 which supplied those districts with water." 



Popular experiments on the causes of disease are per- 

 formed everywhere around us. Even when no epidemic 

 prevails, our hospitals are crowded with the sick and. 

 dying, and many, very many, of these are dying from 

 lack of knowledge. Probably the most dreaded scourge 

 of this country is pulmonary consumption, or tubercle, as 

 it is sometimes shortly termed, from a pathological pro- 

 duct found in the lungs in this disease. This fearful 

 malady seems often to attack the most beautiful and the 

 most gifted. We have hospitals established especially for 

 its treatment, and these institutions are crowded to the 

 door, applicants having to wait weeks, perhaps months, 

 before they can obtain admission. Hitherto we have 

 been accustomed to regard this dreadful disease as one 

 which we had no power to guard against, and whose 

 attacks were no more to be averted than the stroke of a 

 thunderbolt. But increased knowledge has already shown 

 us how to avoid or prevent to a great extent the danger 

 which we might otherwise incur from the lightning-llash, 

 and increased knowledge is now showing us the causes 

 which may induce consumption, and thus teaching us 

 how to avoid them. By experiment upon animals we 

 are learning the nature of the morbid processes which 

 occur in this disease, and the conditions which give rise 

 to them. We are learning that tuberculosis in cows may 

 be communicated to healthy animals fed upon the milk 

 which they yield, and that tubercular disease may also be 

 induced by tubercular matter inhaled in the air or con- 

 veyed into the stomach. In these experiments upon 

 animals we are simply repeating in a scientific way the 

 popular experiments which men daily make in blind 

 ignorance upon men. We communicate to a few animals 

 a disease of which men perish by thousands, and by the 

 sacrifice of a few dogs or rabbits we gain knowledge 

 which may enable us to preserve the lives of thousands of 

 men, and avert the anguish which their untimely death 

 would cause to their relations. 



In the out-patient departments of our general hos- 

 pitals there are probably no cases more trying to the 

 humane physician than the cases of consumption which 

 he sees. Racked by cough and worn to a shadow as 

 they often are, the physician knows that he can do but 

 little for them if they are admitted. The utmost that his 

 art is capable of is somewhat to alleviate their sufferings, 

 and perhaps slightly to prolong a comparatively useless 

 life. For these reasons he is often obliged to sacrifice 

 his own feelings, and to refuse admission to the sufferer, 



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