November 27, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



679 



me if I assert that medicine is as well as 

 an art a science ? Somewhere it is said that 

 woman is the last thing that man will ever 

 civilize. So the scientific aspect, the male 

 face of two visaged medicine, thinks of that 

 female face, the empiric, with whom his lot 

 is linked. He feels sometimes that his other 

 half i.s the last thing science will ever ren- 

 der wholly rational. By dint of patient 

 toil he improves her practice by showing 

 her a reason now and then. No sooner is 

 that done than she is off on a fresh flight 

 into the inexplicable, and he nni^ cudgel 

 his brains anew to find her a fresh logical 

 position. 



The feminine, ever youthful trait in 

 medicine has to the student an undying 

 charm. But, on the whole, the countenance 

 of medicine has of recent years, for the 

 student, become masculinely severe. This 

 masculine head of medicine has indeed be- 

 come the larger. Hydrocephalic in appear- 

 ance though it may be, it is filled, not with 

 water, but with reasoned facts. The devel- 

 opment proceeds in the main from certain 

 data acquired in the century just passed. 

 For instance, the chemist, in discovering 

 that all the million-sided chemical diversity 

 of the perceptible universe is composed 

 from a few — some seventy — substances, 

 therefore called elemental, discovered also 

 that living matter, instead of containing 

 elements different from and subtler than 

 those of the dead world, consists of just a 

 few of the very commonest of those same 

 ones. Further, the doctrine of the inde- 

 structibility of matter was demonstrated in 

 a new form, namely, as the indestructi- 

 bility of energy, and the convertibility of 

 any one form of energj' into other forms. 

 Thus dead and living matter became united 

 as subject material for study. It became 

 really possible to consider the living body 

 as a chemical and phy.sieal machine, a ma- 

 chine to which the laws of chemistry and 

 physics can be applied. 



But this scientific progress in medicine, 

 fruitful of benefit to the community, lays 

 on the community a burden of obligation. 

 The empirical part of medicine is at once 

 the most easy and the most difificult thing to 

 teach. The preparation for learning it re- 

 quires but little training in other subjects. 

 Its facts lean on nothing but themselves. 



With the scientific part of medicine it is 

 different. That is based upon initiatory 

 studies. Medicine, historicall.y traced, we 

 find first drawing help from the simplest 

 and nearest at hand of these adjuvant 

 studies. First she bent to the study of the 

 gross form of the parts and organs of the 

 body. The gross form of these is signi- 

 ficant chiefly where they are machinery 

 for application of mechanical powers. The 

 greater part of the corporeal machinery 

 is, however, not destined for such work, 

 but has its purpose in processes chemical, 

 thermal and electrical, to which— marvel- 

 ous appendage— mentality is adjunct. 

 Medicine in the course of the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries sucked dry for 

 the most part what the study of the gross 

 form of the body's parts could yield her. 

 She then turned to the study of microscopic 

 form— examined what Bichat first named 

 the tissues, the fabric of the body. In so 

 doing she earae upon a great generalization, 

 the cell doctrine, discovering an essential 

 and visible similarity of microscopic struc- 

 ture in all that has life, differentiating it 

 from all which has not life. 



But even before the advent of the cell 

 theory, medicine had begun to ask of chem- 

 istry what it co\ild give her. With the 

 discovery of oxygen and of the nature of 

 combustion the links between biology and 

 chemistry began to be tightly drawn. The 

 young Oxford physician, Mayow, had per- 

 formed the fundamental experiments on 

 respiration and had discovered oxygen 

 more than a century before Priestley and 

 Lavoisier; but the time was not ripe until 



