7U6 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 517. 



to him. And I hope to live to see the day 

 when our now overgrown zoological and 

 botanical societies shall languish while 

 groups of men devoted to a common sub- 

 ject and investigating it with the most 

 diverse material will meet together to dis- 

 cuss results of common interest. When a 

 subject no longer demands vigorous investi- 

 gation and the center of activity is shifted 

 ■elsewhere I should like to see the old asso- 

 ciations abandoned and new ones formed 

 to advance the newly risen problems. Our 

 large societies are a hindrance, I sometimes 

 think, rather than a means of advancement 

 to science. We want smaller meetings 

 with more acute interest. And, finally, I 

 can not but remark on the vastness of the 

 preliminary training which the present 

 ramifications of every science make neces- 

 sary. Research in the fields between the 

 old sciences has rewards for the investi- 

 gator, but he who would reap, those rewards 

 must prepare himself through years de- 

 voted to gaining the mastery of many 

 sciences. 



Chas. B. Davenport. 

 Cold Spring Haebor, N. Y. 



THE PROBLEMS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE.* 

 To I'eeognize, to prevent, to protect, to 

 heal— these are, in the broadest sense, the 

 tasks of internal medicine now as ever. 

 But how different are the problems which 

 occupy our attention to-day from those of 

 the period commemorated by this congress. 

 Let us for a moment glance back at the 

 medicine of the close of the eighteenth and 

 the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. 

 For over two hundred years the blind and 

 binding faith of the middle ages, the faith 

 that had so long fettered the human mind, 

 had been slowly giving way before the 



* Address deliveied before the Section for In- 

 ternal Medicine of the International Congress of 

 Arts and Sciences, at St. Louis, September 22, 

 1904. 



forces of reason and truth. Now and 

 again with ever-increasing frequency, great 

 and courageous minds had risen above the 

 clouds of medical tradition and dogma, 

 which had smothered the understanding 

 and reason of mankind, as if, indeed, medi- 

 cine were a part of the religious doctrine 

 which ruled the world. For truly the 

 medicine of the middle ages was largely a 

 matter of faith, and as a matter of faith 

 one in which reason beyond a certain point 

 was heresy and sacrilege. Vesalius with 

 genius and courage had begun to with- 

 draw the veil, from naked and iconoclastic 

 truth. Harvey had made his great dis- 

 covery. Glisson had demonstrated his 

 theory of irritability. Mayow with his 

 'Spiritus nitro-ffireus' had anticipated the 

 discovery of oxygen. Leeuwenhoek and 

 Malpighi and Hooke had opened to the 

 human eye the realm of the infinitely small. 

 Bacon and Descartes and Newton and 

 Locke had introduced into the world a ra- 

 tional and natural philosophy. Locke, 

 himself, indeed, a wise physician, had 

 pointed clearly to the true path of med- 

 ical progress. "Were it my business," 

 says he, ' ' to understand physick, would not 

 the safer way be to consult nature herself 

 in the history of diseases and their cures, 

 than espouse the principles of the dog- 

 matists, methodists or chymists. " 



But the clouds of medical tradition were 

 slow to clear away. Gradually, however, 

 the first 'lonely mountain peaks of mind' 

 had been followed by an ever-increasing 

 number of earnest and untrammeled stu- 

 dents. In the seventeenth century the op- 

 portunity to give one's life freely to the 

 search for truth had become more and more 

 open to all. The mysticism and animism 

 of Stahl which, in the early part of the 

 eighteenth, hung over the medical world, 

 was already breaking away. The study of 

 the natural sciences was pursued more 

 eagerly and generally than ever before. 



