RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 361 



of physiology. It is true that if we judge it by even the advanced 

 knowledge of to-day, it takes up but a small part of the whole teaching 

 of the science; but when we come to know about it that which we are 

 to know, all the rest of physiology will shrink into a mere appendage 

 of it, and the teacher of the future will hurry over all that to which 

 to-day we devote so much of the year's course, in order that he may 

 enter into the real and dominant part. 



There is no need for me to expound in detail how the knowledge 

 gained by the three methods of which 1 have been speaking, in laying 

 bare the secrets of nervous diseases and opening up the way for suc- 

 cessful treatment and accurate and trustworthy prognosis, has helped 

 onward the art of medicine. Even the younger among us must be 

 impressed when he compares what we know to-day of the diseases of 

 the nervous system with what we knew, 1 will not say fifty, but even 

 twenty, nay even ten, years ago. Do not for a moment suppose that I 

 am attempting to maintain that the great clinical progress which has 

 taken place has resulted from the direct, immediate application to the 

 bedside of laboratory work, or that I wish to use this to exalt the physi- 

 ological horn. I would desire to take a higher and broader standpoint, 

 namely this, that the close relations and mutual interdependence of 

 laboratory physiology and that bedside physiology which we sometimes 

 call pathology, and the necessity of both for the medical art, are 

 nowhere more clearly shown than by the history of our recent advance 

 in a knowledge of the nervous system as a whole. In this, when we 

 strive to follow out the genesis of the new truths, it is almost impossi- 

 ble to trace out that which has come from the laboratory and that from 

 the hospital ward, so closely have the two worked together; an idea 

 started at the bedside has again and again been extended, shaped, or 

 corrected by experimental results and been brought back in increased 

 fruitfulness to the bedside. On the other hand, a new observation 

 which, had it been confined to the laboratory, would have remained 

 barren and without result, has no less often proved in the hands of the 

 physician the key to clinical problems the unlocking of which has in 

 turn opened up new physiological ideas. 



And, though the scope, of these Huxley lectures is to deal with the 

 relations of the sciences to the medical art, I shall, I trust, be- pardoned 

 if I turn aside to point out that this swelling knowledge of how nerve 

 cell and nerve fiber play their parts in bringing about the complex 

 work done by man's nervous system is not narrowed to the relief of 

 those sufferings which come to humanity in the sick room. Mankind 

 suffers much more deeply, much more widely, through misdirected 

 activities of the nervous system, the meddling with which lies outside 

 the immediate calling of the doctor. Yet every doctor, I may say every 

 thoughtful man, can not but recognize that the distinction between a 

 so-called physical and a so-called moral cause is often a shadowy and 

 indistinct one, and that certainly so-called moral results are often the 



