664 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXn. No. 



of the wires belong to the system of the loci, 

 and the fixed points are found from the condi- 

 tion that the radius of the circle is a mean 

 proportional between the distances from the 

 center to the inverse points. 



COENELL UnIVEBSITT, V. KaRAPETOFF 



June 25, 1910 



QUOTATIONS 



THE DOCTOR A2JD THE PUBLIC 



In an article entitled " The Widening 

 Sphere of Medicine," but which might as ap- 

 propriately have been entitled " The Doctor 

 and the Public," read last year as the Shattuck 

 lecture before the Massachusetts Medical So- 

 ciety, and now printed by the department of 

 neurology of Harvard University,' Dr. E. W. 

 Taylor, of Boston, indicates and attempts to 

 estimate the significance -of various well-de- 

 fined tendencies in present-day medicine. Dr. 

 Taylor was led to this subject by a considera- 

 tion of the rapidly widening scope of medical 

 theory and practise, with its new and unique 

 opportunities, and the apparent disinclination 

 on the part of many men of promise and varied 

 attainments to take up medicine as a career. 

 What, however, must strike every reader of 

 Dr. Taylor's wise and scholarly address is not 

 so much the natural extension and develop- 

 ment of the scope and attainments of medical 

 science, extraordinary though these have been, 

 nor the avoidance of medicine as a career by 

 men of outstanding ability — an economic 

 problem possibly more felt in America than 

 here — but the manner in which the writer dis- 

 cerns the new conceptions and ideals which 

 have accompanied the development of medical 

 science, lays bare the significance of certain 

 economic adjustments, and, as if from some 

 point of vantage, scans the signs of the times 

 and foretells the dawn of a new era in the 

 aims and practise of medicine. 



Archbishop Trench said that a man might 

 fairly be assumed to remember clearly and well 



'■ " The Widening Sphere of Medicine," the Shat- 

 tuck lecture before the Massachusetts Medical 

 Society, June, 1909, by E. W. Taylor, M.D., Bos- 

 ton, department of neurology, Harvard Medical 

 School, Vol. IV., 1910. 



for sixty years back, and that only five of these 

 sixties would carry us back to the age of 

 Spenser, and not more than eight to the time 

 of Chaucer and Wiclif. In that time the 

 English lang-uage has become metamorphosed; 

 yet any one of the imagined series of eight 

 men, Dr. Trench said, would have denied that 

 there had been in his lifetime any change 

 worth mentioning. It can not be said that 

 the statement holds good for medicine. The 

 changes in a single lifetime have been so 

 great, the innovations— anesthesia, antisepsis, 

 bacteriology, and in the minute anatomy of 

 the body, to name only a few — so startling, 

 that new sciences have sprung into being and 

 the medical man of to-day speaks a different 

 language even from his immediate predecessor. 

 These changes strike everybody, but changes — 

 perhaps more revolutionary, though less notice- 

 able — are now in process, and they concern 

 the relations susbsisting between the medical 

 man and the public. It is to this altered 

 phase that Dr. Taylor draws attention, and it 

 is to meet the altered conditions that he de- 

 siderates corresponding adaptations in the 

 teaching faculties. 



One of the first of these changes to which 

 Dr. Taylor alludes is the absence of secrecy. 

 From time immemorial medicine has been a 

 secret art. Even a generation ago the appren- 

 tice was bound by agreement "not to reveal 

 or to divulge any of his master's secrets or 

 the secrets of his profession " ; to-day the med- 

 ical practitioner, in his relations with a pri- 

 vate patient, frequently explains not only the 

 nature of the case, but the rationale of the 

 treatment, with the hope of securing the pa- 

 tient's willing cooperation. What Dr. Taylor 

 calls this gradual removal of mystery has had 

 far-reaching effects. The doctor's mere dic- 

 tum no longer carries weight ; " his Latin pre- 

 scriptions, if he still writes them, are doubt- 

 fully scrutinized, and the patient more and ■ 

 more demands to know what he is taking and 

 why; he readily seeks other advice outside the 

 profession if the expected benefit does not 

 result from the treatment prescribed. . . . The 

 doctor of the present day shares the practise 

 of medicine as never before with persons 



