Appendix C 



diseases and therefore no art in curing or preventing them. 

 The most that could be done was to let them run their course, 

 allaying as might be some of their most annoying symptoms. 



Antiseptic treatment was only guesswork. We had not heard 

 of carbolic acid, or barely heard of it, and the coal-tar products 

 with their varied possibilities of usefulness and mischief still 

 lay in the fossil beds of the earth. Surgery was a matter of 

 luck, a gamble, as the phrase is, still conducted, as has been 

 said, "along the lines laid down by the early Egyptians." 

 There had been no Lister to show the reason for clean knives, 

 clean hands, and clean air, and the battlefields of those days 

 were a wild riot of the germs of gangrene and blood poisoning. 



As surgery did not exist, we knew nothing of preventive sur- 

 gery or the surgery of pathology. As medicine dealt with symp- 

 toms, we knew nothing of pharmacology. Those were the days 

 before Michael Foster, and physiology was still merely a series 

 of deductions from the facts of elementary anatomy. The nature 

 and structure of the body cell were very scantily known. With- 

 out knowing the germ cell — the physical basis of heredity — 

 the science of heredity was unknown, and without accurate 

 knowledge of heredity the science of eugenics can have no 

 existence or meaning. 



In these times, the facts and laws of pathology are to the 

 trained physician as essential as the alphabet or the multiplica- 

 tion table to the rest of the world. But we poor practical doctors 

 of our day had to get along without it. Science had not reached 

 so far, and we had to be practical men because perforce we 

 could not be scientific. Dr. Charles Sedgwick Minot has well 

 pointed out the distinction. "The only important difference," 

 he says, "between the practical doctor and the scientific doctor 

 is that the patients of the practical doctor are more likely to 

 die." In healing men, as in other lines of industry, the first 

 requisite is to know how. To know how is the essence of science. 



The next stage of the scientific doctor is not merely to cure 

 his patients but to help conduct the affairs of the community 

 so that men and women will no longer come to him to be cured. 

 Half the disease of the world comes from the infection of the 

 crowd. Nine tenths of the infection of the crowd could be 

 spared if the knowledge we have could work itself out in govern- 

 mental action. 



C 792 3 



