340 RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 



ment of tkeni as a ^hole would far exceed not only the time at my dis- 

 posal, but also, what is more, my powers to treat and your patience to 

 hear. I will not dare so hopeless a task. Nor will I attempt to select 

 what may be deemed, or what may appear to me, the most important 

 of these advances, and expound the bearings on medicine of these 

 alone. I venture to hope I shall best fulfill the duty laid upon me, and 

 meet with your approval, if I single out and dwell on one or two gen- 

 eral themes suggested by the history of scieuce during those fifty-odd 

 years. 



The first theme is one suggested by a survey of the studies which 

 engaged young Huxley in the school bere in 1842. This will bring 

 before us a special bearing on our profession of the advance of science 

 which, though it may not be evident at first sight to everyone, is never- 

 theless real and important. 



Each case of illness is to the doctor in charge a scientific problem, to 

 be solved by scientific methods. This is seen more and more clearly 

 and acknowledged more and more distinctly year by year. Now, it is 

 true that each science has, to a certain exteut, its own methods, to be 

 learned only in that science itself; and from time to time we may see 

 how a man eminent in one branch of science goes astray when he puts 

 forward solutions of problems iu another branch, to the special methods 

 of which he is a stranger. In nothing is this more true than in an 

 applied science like that of medicine. At the bedside only can the 

 methods of clinical inquiry be really learned; it is only here that a stu- 

 dent can gain that kind of mind which leads him straight to the heart 

 of disease, that genius artis, without which scientific knowledge, how- 

 ever varied, however accurate, becomes nothing more than a useless 

 burden or a dangerous snare. Yet, it is no less true that the mind 

 which has been already sharpened by the methods of one science takes 

 a keener edge, and that more quickly, when it is put on the whetstone 

 of another science, than does a mind which knows nothing of no science. 

 And more than once inquiry in one science has been quickened by the 

 inroad of a mind coming fresh from the methods of a quite different 

 science. For all sciences are cognate; their methods though different 

 are allied, and certain attitudes of the mind are common to them all. 

 In respect to nothing is this more true than in respect to the methods 

 of medicine. Our profession has been the mother of most of the 

 sciences, and her children are ever coming back to help her. Iu our 

 art all the sciences seem to converge — physical, chemical, biological 

 methods join hands to form the complete clinical method. This is the 

 real justification for that period of preparatory scientific study which 

 each enactment of the authorities makes longer and harder for the 

 student of medicine. It is this, and not the mere acquirement of facts. 

 The facts, it is true, are needed. Every day the doctor has to lay hold, 

 for professional use, of mechanical, physical, chemical, biological facts. 

 But facts are things which the well-trained mind can pick up and make 



