August II, 1881] 



NATURE 



347 



the control of the members of the Society for the Protection of 

 Animals, so that the members may be at liberty to enter the 

 laboratories at any time. 



It would be a mischievous delusion to believe that this move- 

 ment is without prospect of success, and devoid of danger be- 

 cause of its manifest exaggeration. On the contrary, unmis- 

 takable signs indicate that it has gained powerful allies, and that 

 there is an increasingly impending danger in many countries that 

 even the State institutions, created expressly fjr the purpose of 

 experiment, may have the scientific freedom of their methods 

 attacked. So much the more does it seem to be incumbent on 

 the representatives of medical science to defend their position, 

 and to meet international attacks by international weapons. 

 The most powerful weapon^ however, is truth ; and here, above 

 all, truth founded on competent knowledge. If we cannot demon- 

 strate our good right before all the world, and come to a mutual 

 agreement on the ground of this right, our cause must hence- 

 forth be looked on as a lost one. 



The attacks which are directed against us fall, when closely 

 examined, into two categories, according to the principal point. 

 On the one side it is alleged that the experimental method — yea, 

 modern medicine altogether— is materialistic, if not nihilistic, in 

 its ultimate object ; that it offends against sentiment, against 

 morals. On the o.her side it is denied that the introduction of 

 experimeuls on animals has had any actual use, that medicine 

 has been really promoted thereby, and especially that the cure of 

 diseases has in consequence made any recognisable progress. 

 Even those who admit that there has been some progress, yet 

 believe that just as much information could have been imparted 

 by anatomy alone as by experiments on living animals. 



Such objections are not new to one who knows the history of 

 medicine. For hundreds of years, on similar or identical grounds, 

 the dissection of human bodies was impeded, and anatomists 

 were confined to the dissection of dead animals ; if, indeed — as 

 was done by Paracelsus, the contemporary of Vesalius — the in- 

 sulting question were not asked, whether analomy was of any 

 use at all. The feeling of the masses was raised against the 

 dissection of human bodies ; and it is known that, at the com- 

 mencement of the fourteenth century, the church for the first 

 time gave permission for this to be done, but only under limita- 

 tions which were still greater than those under which the larger 

 number of our modern opponents would permit vivisection. It 

 was no accident that the period of the reformation in the church 

 first created for the great Vesalius a free field, so that he might 

 test the truth of Galen's traditional dogmata by his own investi- 

 gation of human bodies, and place true human anatomy in the 

 stead of that anatomy of animals, which had during centuries 

 formed the groundwork of all medical ideas on the internal 

 arrangement of man. 



And now, first of all, pathological anatomy — what obstacles 

 it has had to overcome even in the present time ! Nothing is 

 more instructive in this respect than tlie narrative which Wepfer, 

 the celebrated discoverer of the haimorrhagic nature of ordinary 

 apoplexy, gives of the acts of enmity with which he was perse- 

 cuted when — it was towards the middle of the seventeenth 

 century — the council of the town of SchalThausen had allowed 

 him to dissect ihe bodies of those dying in the hospital. The 

 only reply wdiich he made to those who said to him that it is 

 injurious and disgraceful to soil his hands with blood and sanies, 

 wa-, that he could cleanse his hands with some water ; but that 

 much more disgraceful and injurious is ignorance of anatomical 

 facts, which inflicts on inexperienced physicians and surgeons a 

 disgrace that not the Rhine, not the ocean itself can wash away.' 

 Hence the study of anatomy is much rather to be praised, and 

 to be supported by those who exercise the executive power in 

 the State. 



In fact, one Government after another has recognised the 

 decided importance of anatomical science. As far as the civi- 

 lised world extends, so far at the present day are human bodies 

 dissected. Even tlie laity comprehends that, without the most 

 accurate knowledge of the structure of the human body and of 

 the changes which disease and recovery produce in it, skilled 

 action on the part of the physician is impossible. Any one who 

 can only take a general survey of the history of science, must 

 know that both the greatest epochs of the resuscitation and re- 

 formation of medicine commenced with the definite establish- 

 ment of both the principal branches of human anatomy, and 



' Joh. Jac. Wepfer. "Observ. Anat. ex Cadaveribus eorum quos sustultt 

 Apopiexia." Scbaffhausii 165S. "Prsefatio: Turpior et damnosiorrerumana- 

 tomicarum ignorantia est, quas imperitis Medicis et Chirurgis iguominiam 

 parit, quam nee Rhenus, vec Oceanus abluere potest." 



were even essentially brought about thereby. In the sixteenth 

 century it was physiological anatomy which brought about the 

 definitive victory of empiricism over dogmatism, of science over 

 tradition ; in the eighteenth century it was pathological anatomy 

 which replaced mysticism by realism, speculation by necropsy, 

 obscure groping and gaiessing by systematic thought. The oppo- 

 ne Its indeed spoke of materialism ; but Harvey has rightly said ; 

 "Sicut s.anoruai et boni habitas corporumdissectio plurimum ad 

 phil 'sophiam et rectam physiologiam facet, ita corporum mor- 

 bosorum et cacheticorum inspectio potissimum ad pathologiam 

 philosophicam.' 



Antiquity had only one time in which a powerful effort was 

 made for the independent develop nent of human anatomy. It 

 was the time of the Alexandrian School, in the third century 

 B.C., when Erasistratus and his companion , under the protection 

 of the Ptolemies, undertook the first regular dissections of human 

 bodies. The school existed only a short time, and yet it caused 

 the first perceptible agitation of the humoral systeai of p.athology. 

 Willi the more accurate knowledge of the arrangement of the 

 nerves there grew up a new and more powerful generation of 

 solidi^ts ; the empirics raised themselves against the dogmatists, 

 and, though again soon enough subdued, they left behind them 

 as a lasting inheritance the consideration that there is a certain 

 limit to human piety, that the right of the individual to the 

 preservation of the integrity of his body is interrupted by death, 

 and that the veil which covers the mystery of life cannot be 

 raised without the forcible destruction of the connection of the 

 several parts of the body. It is this thought which, as finally 

 realised, has brought forth modern medicine. But, eighteen 

 centuries after the Alexandrian School, the impress of the 

 humiral system of pathology still held independent sway in 

 medicine. Of any positive progress in pathology daring that 

 long period nothing can be said. For Bacon has excellently 

 said, in his " Novum Organum," "Qu:e in Natura fundata sunt, 

 crescunt et augentur : quce autem in opinione, variantur, non 

 augentur." The old humoral pathology was incapable of deve- 

 lopment, because it was not founded on nature, but on dogmata. 

 From however different origins they had sprung, Galenism com- 

 bined everywhere with orthodoxy : among the 'Arabians with 

 Islam, in the we t with Christianity ; and it required the power- 

 ful movement of the Reformation to burst the chains within 

 which antiquated custom and hierarchical schooling had fettered 

 the thoughts even of physicians. From Erasistratus to VesaUus, 

 and at last to Morgagni, is such an immense stride that it cannot 

 remain concealed even from the weakest eye. Not only the 

 outer form, but the whole nature of medicine has been thereby 

 changed. If one follows Vesalius, yea, even Morg.agni, in 

 speaking of the humor.al patholog)- as among still-existing things ; 

 if I myself am yet obliged to contend against Rokit.insky, the last 

 of the pronounced hum iral pathologists, it must still not be for- 

 gotten that that was no longer the humoral pathology of Galen 

 or Hippocrates. The four " cardinal juices " Paracelsus had 

 already buried ; modern medicine recogiaises only the actual 

 juices which flow in the vessels, and thence penetrate into the 

 tissues. This modern humoral pathology was essentially blood- 

 pathology (haamatopathology). In name only does it agree with 

 the humoral pathology of the ancients : in reality, it is quite 

 another thing. 



But even haematopathology is now happily overcome, and 

 indeed, again, through a proper direction of anatomical study. 

 Since the first but very uncertain researches in the territory of 

 so-called general or philosophical anatomy which Bichat began 

 in the commencement of the pre-ent century, down to the more 

 and more rapid advances which the present time has made by 

 means of the microscope, in the knowledge of the more minute 

 processes of healthy and diseased life, attention has been con- 

 stantly more and more turned from the coarser relations of whole 

 regions and organs of the body to the tissues of which those 

 organs are constituted, and to the elements which again are the 

 efficient centres of ac'ivity within those tissues. Immediately 

 after Schavann had dem :)nstrated the importance of cells in the 

 development of the tissues, Johannes Miiller and John Goodsir 

 made the happiest applications of the new view to pathological 

 processes ; and, looking back to a period in which we ourselves 

 have lived, and which embraces little more than a generation of 

 man, we may now say that never before was there a time when 

 a similarly great zeal in research, and a comparable — though 

 only approximately so — progress in science and knowledge, has 



' " Gull. Harveji Exercit. Anat." ii., " De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis Cir- 

 culalione." Roterodami, 167 1, p. 174. 



