542 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 
same cautions as in the Bronchitis, are to be employed ; and two other remedies 
have been much recommended—Opium, especially combined with Calomel, and 
the Solution of Tartar Emetic.’ It seems scarcely credible to us nowadays that 
about this same period a low diet, blood-letting, emetics, and purgatives were 
employed as a treatment in phthisis, yet such is the case. It is in keeping with 
the above, and in strange contrast to modern treatment, to find it recommended 
that if the patient cannot winter abroad he is ordered ‘strict confinement within 
doors in an artificial climate, as near as possible to 60° Fahr., during at least 
six months of the year in Britain.’ From the text-books of medicine of this 
period, only seventy years back, instances of wrongful and even dangerous 
treatment in most of the important diseases might be produced. There is no 
basis of accurate scientific knowledge of physiology, bio-chemistry, or bacteriology 
underlying the visionary notions about disease. The real causes of the diseases 
being obscure, they are commonly set down to so-called diatheses or habits such 
as the ‘hemorrhagic diathesis’ or the ‘scrophulous habit.’ Also, the action of 
infective organisms and the intimate relationships in regard to infection of 
members of the same family being unknown or forgotten, such ‘habits’ are 
erroneously set down as hereditary. When there is no other channel of escape 
the word ‘ idiopathic’ is coined to cover the ignorance of the learned. 
If now we pass onwards about thirty years in time, halving the distance be- 
tween the above period and our own time, and consult an important text-book of 
medicine published in 1876 by a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a 
physician and lecturer at a aa London Medical School, and a lecturer on 
pathology and physiology, we find that the progress attained by research in 
physiology, and physiological chemistry, and a growing belief in the possibility 
of infection in many diseases by the micro-organisms, now demonstrated so clearly 
in certain cases by Pasteur and his followers, have commenced to do their bene- 
ficent work in medical practice. The heroic bleedings and leechings and the 
scarcely less violent druggings with strong drugs have disappeared. The patient 
is less harassed by his doctor, who is more content to assist the natural processes 
of recuperation as his knowledge of applied physiology and hygiene teach him, 
rather than to thwart them and to lessen resistance as his predecessor often did 
a generation ago when he knew no physiology and less hygiene. Still, the com- 
parison between the text-book of even forty years ago and one of the present 
day shows a wonderful advance, all flowing from the use of the research method 
in the intervening years, both in knowledge of the origins and in the treatments 
of the diseases. 
Time and space forbid going into details, but the whole of serum-, vaccine-, 
and organo-therapy were unknown, with the single exception of vaccination for 
variola. Enteric fever has been separated from typhus, but its etiology is still 
obscure, and, to a large extent as a consequence, the mortality from it is fifteen 
to sixteen per cent., or quadruple present-day figures, and it is one of the 
commonest of diseases. The cause of diphtheria is unknown, although it is 
now recognised as a ‘ contagious’ disease, and as yet research in bacteriology 
has supplied no cure for it. The unity of the various forms of tuberculosis is 
unsuspected, the infecting organism is unknown, and, as a result, it is not 
even recognised as an infectious disease and heredity figures most strongly in 
a dubious etiology leading up to a vacillating treatment. Pneumonia is not 
recognised as due to a micro-organism, and is described as one of the ‘ idiopathic ’ 
diseases. The cause of syphilis, and its relationship to tabes dorsalis, and 
general paralysis are unknown, and generally it may be said that the causes of 
disease are either entirely unknown or erroneously given in at least three-quarters 
of the very incomplete list of diseases that are classified and described. 
This, after all the centuries, was the doleful position of medical science in 
the year 1876, when suddenly light began to shine upon it, brought not by the 
agency of any member of the medical profession, but by a physiological chemist, 
and he was led to his great discovery, not in an attempt to solve some problem 
of practical medicine, but by scientific observations devoted to an apparently 
purely philosophical critical research into the supposed origin of life in a 
particular way. 
It was the experimental or research method in bio-chemistry supported by 
physiological experiments on animals which in the hands of Louis Pasteur 
ibd ae 
