I.— PHYSIOLOGY. 157 



the ordinary medical student to proceed directly to the prosecution of 

 research in any of its branches ; this can only be achieved by a further 

 year or two of study of the subject, such as by a science course for an 

 honours degree. One of the objects of instruction is to enable the latest 

 results of physiological investigation to be utilised in the clinic, and it 

 seems to me that one of the best ways for this to be effected is for some 

 workers specially trained in physiological methods to enter the staff of 

 clinical units where facilities for research work are at hand. The opinion 

 was at one time prevalent among many clinicians that if their problems 

 required the use of methods similar to those of experimental physiology 

 these should be farmed out to a physiologist, and although there are 

 cases where this procedure may be followed with advantage, the rich 

 harvest which has already been reaped by the importation of physiological 

 knowledge and methods into, rather than the export of problems from, the 

 clinic, is adequate justification for the former. It is in any case encouraging 

 to note the present-day decline of the attitude that experimental investiga- 

 tion is work of a lower order, which can be put out like so much washing, 

 for the employment of an inferior caste. We at the present day, however 

 we may be labelled, are not merely willing to admit, but eager to assert, 

 that we cannot recognise fundamentally distinct methods of physiology, 

 of psychology, of medicine, of chemistry, or of physics ; we only admit a 

 method of experimental inquiry common to all science and slightly modified 

 to suit particular cases. 



The close connexion which is now generally admitted between 

 physiology and medicine was clearly foreseen by Claude Bernard in 1855. 

 Medicine, he said, is a science, and physicians who describe it as an art 

 injure it, because ' they exalt a physician's personality by lowering the 

 importance of science.' ' True experimenting physicians,' he says, ' should 

 be no more perplexed at a patient's bedside than empirical physicians. 

 They will make use of all the therapeutic means advised by empiricism ; 

 only, instead of using them according to authority and with a confidence 

 akin to superstition, they will administer them with that philosophic 

 doubt which is appropriate to true experimenters.' And this attitude, 

 I venture to think, is the one which is almost universal to-day. 



Scientific Aspects. 



Physiology takes its place as a science in proportion as its data are 

 accurate and its principles fall into line with those in the other sciences. 

 My great teacher Starling said that science has only one language, that 

 of quantity, and but one argument, that of experiment. The qualitative 

 observations of one generation tend to become quantitative at a later 

 stage of development of a science, and the degree of development of a 

 science can indeed to some extent be judged by the extent to which it 

 falls into a scheme of the unity of science by giving results which are 

 capable of mathematical treatment and of expression in broad general 

 principles. 



I recollect that when I first took up the study of chemistry the 

 acquaintance of most chemists with any of the branches of mathematics 

 was so slight that there was on the market a book on arithmetical chemistry. 

 Shortly after that time the progress of physical chemistry on the Continent 



