December 26, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



1003 



his brilliance siioulcl shine unrivaled 

 through the dark ages? 



For more than a thousand years follow- 

 ing the death of Galen, his authority in 

 all things medical was supreme, and the 

 doctrine of the pneuma was unchallenged. 

 Only when there came the intellectual 

 awakening of the Renaissance did men 

 ask themselves whether Galen's books or 

 the human body more nearly represented 

 the truth. But it was even long after this 

 that the pneuma was deposed, and when 

 it fell it was only to give place to the 

 archceus of that archcharlatan, Para- 

 celsus, and to the anima sensitiva of the 

 mystic philosopher. Van Helmont, and the 

 melancholy pietist, Stahl. Through the 

 latter part of the eighteenth and the early 

 part of the nineteenth century the vital 

 principle was still in control of the physi- 

 ologists, but, as they learned more of the 

 conservation and the transformation of 

 energjr in inanimate things, and more of 

 the working of living bodies, the gulf be- 

 tween the inanimate and the animate 

 gradually narrowed, and the supremacy 

 of the laws of chemistry and physics in all 

 things living became clearly recognized. 

 It is true that at times in these latter days, 

 sporadic upshoots of a neo-vitalism raise 

 their tiny heads, but these are to be as- 

 cribed to the innate aversion of the human 

 mind to confess its ignorance of what it 

 really does not know, and they do not re- 

 ceive serious attention from the more hope- 

 ful seekers after truth. 



The elimination from scientific concep- 

 tions of the idea of vital force made pos- 

 sible a rational development of the science 

 of physiology, and in this way led directly 

 to the growth of a scientific medicine. In 

 one of his luminous essays Huxley has 

 written: "A scorner of physic once said 

 that nature and disease may be compared 

 to two men fighting, the doctor to a blind 

 man with a club, who strikes into the 



melee, sometimes hitting the disease and 

 sometimes hitting nature." * * * The in- 

 terloper "had better not meddle at all, 

 until his eyes are opened — until he can see 

 the exact position of his antagonists, and 

 make sure of the effect of his blows. But 

 that which it behooves the physician to see, 

 not, indeed, with his bodily eye, but with 

 clear intellectual vision, is a process, and 

 the chain of causation involved in that 

 process. Disease * * * is a perturbation 

 of the normal activities of a living body, 

 and it is, and must remain, unintelligible, 

 so long as we are ignorant of the natiire 

 of these normal activities. In other words, 

 there could be no real science of pathology 

 until the science of physiology had reached 

 a degree of perfection unattained, and 

 indeed unattainable, until quite recent 

 times. ' ' 



No period has been so rich in physiolog- 

 ical discoveries as the last fifty years of 

 the nineteenth century. Research has de- 

 veloped along two main lines, the physical 

 and the chemical, and to-day physiology 

 is rightly regarded as the foundation stone 

 of the science of diseases, and thiis as the 

 basis of scientific treatment. 



The Cell Doctrine. — At the time when 

 vital force was having its death struggle, 

 the cell doctrine was being born. In- 

 separably linked with the idea of the cell 

 is the idea of protoplasm— protoplasm the 

 living substance, the cell the morphological 

 unit. The heretofore mysterious living 

 body is a complex mass of minute living 

 particles, and the life of the individual is 

 the composite life of those particles. 



Within the past few weeks the world has 

 bowed in mourning over the bier of an aged 

 man who, more than forty years age, in 

 the strength of his vigorous manhood, gave 

 to medical science in a well-rounded form 

 the best of the cell doctrine of his time. 

 Rudolf Virchow need have performed no 

 other service than this to have secured 



