August 14, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



199 



doctors, naturalists and teachers of physic, 

 i. e., of nature — need any one ask for 

 a nobler vocation! But if teachers and 

 students of nature, you must be learners, 

 also, and that not merely of the healing art, 

 but of that other equally important sister 

 art, the art of prevention. The call to 

 public health is a call to preventive as well 

 as to healing medicine ; and here under our 

 definitions, you may to-day join hands with 

 such members of the laity as aid in the 

 promotion of health, the prevention of dis- 

 ease; for example, with the sanitary engi- 

 neer, the sanitary chemist, the sanitary 

 biologist, the physiologist, the statistical 

 expert, and the expert in physical educa- 

 tion — for these, too, are naturalists and 

 hence physicists, i. e., in the strict sense, 

 physicians. 



Fortunately, the call of the age to public 

 health comes to us with the new knowledge 

 in pathology. We now know as never be- 

 fore that in that portion of the universe 

 not ourselves lie many, perhaps most, of 

 the sources of our sickness. The call to 

 health is thus largely a call to beware of 

 our environment, i. e., of the things about 

 us, and here at last we can agree with the 

 monastics. But again the unwisdom of a 

 philosophy which bids us turn our eyes 

 heavenward and neglect things close at 

 hand becomes painfully manifest. 



Nor is the newer doctrine merely an en- 

 lightened selfishness; it is practical altru- 

 ism, also, for it recognizes the solidarity of 

 mankind and the fact that whoever purifies 

 drinking water or dirty milk from the 

 germs of disease; whoever promotes tem- 

 perance or avoids sickness in himself or his 

 household, lifts a burden from other men's 

 shoulders and increases the potential effi- 

 ciency of some other of those units of which 

 the whole body politic is made up. The 

 call of the age to health is a call to sacrifice 

 and to service, both personal and public; 

 and the call to service has been the deep- 



ening undertone of the call to humanism, 

 all along the ages. Sophocles, in his day, 

 urged it upon the Athenians, and CEdipus 

 seizes upon public service for his final pas- 

 sionate appeal to the prophet Teiresias for 

 aid against the plague with which the land 

 was cursed: "For in thee is our hope; and 

 a man's noblest task is to help others, by 

 his best means and powers. ' ' Our modern 

 cynics may smile at the inconsistency of an 

 age like our own which is constantly 

 preaching the gospel of service and effi- 

 ciency, and yet suffers grievously from bad 

 domestic service and bad municipal service ; 

 but physicians, at least, do not need to be 

 told that it is one thing to prescribe for a 

 patient and quite another to persuade that 

 patient to follow good advice. 



Let us next inquire what responses these 

 various calls of the scientific age for life 

 and health have hitherto awakened or are 

 now awakening, and what should be the 

 attitude of the young men just graduating 

 in medicine toward the new movement. 

 The first, though perhaps in part uncon- 

 scious, responses were those of the eight- 

 eenth century reformers, Voltaire, Bec- 

 caria, Turgot and others, in France, and 

 Lady Montagu, John Howard, Captain 

 Cook the navigator, and above all Edward 

 Jenner, in England. The eighteenth cen- 

 tury, and especially that portion of it in 

 which Mr. John Morley has happily located 

 the scientific renascence, consciously or 

 unconsciously felt the beginnings of the 

 new movement ; and in Voltaire 's ' ' Man of 

 Calas," in Captain Cook's famous second 

 voyage, in John Howard's travels and rev- 

 elations, in Lady Montagu's introduction 

 of inoculation and Jenner 's work on vac- 

 cination for smallpox, began to shake off 

 medieval ideas of life, death, health, dirt 

 and disease, and to prepare for Virehow 

 and Darwin, and Pasteur and Koch and 

 von Behring in the nineteenth century. 

 As one of th» foremost responses of the 



