684 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



vital phenomena by the help of a wisdom which comes of enlightened 

 experience, and an ingenuity which is born of practice. Were there 

 not a single case on record in which physiology had given special and 

 direct help to the cure of the sick, there would still remain the great 

 truth that the ideas of physiology are the mother-ideas of medicine. 

 The physiologist, unincumbered by the care of the sick, not weighted 

 by the burden of desiring some immediate practical result, is the pio- 

 neer into the dark places of vital actions. The truths which he dis- 

 covers in his laboratory pass over at once to the practitioner, busy in 

 a constant struggle with the puzzling complexity of corporeal events : 

 in his hands they are sifted, extended, and multiplied. The property 

 of the physiologist alone, they might perhaps lie barren ; used by the 

 physician or surgeon, they soon bear fruit. The hint given by a 

 physiologist of the past generation becomes a household word with the 

 doctors of the present, and their records in turn offer rich stores of 

 suggestive and corrective facts for the physiologists of the generation 

 to come. Take away from the practical art of medicine the theoreti- 

 cal truths of physiology, and you would have left a crowd of busy 

 idlers in full strife over fantastic ideas. The reader has laughed with 

 Moliere over the follies of the doctrinaire physicians of times gone by. 

 He has to thank experimental physiology that he has not the same 

 follies to laugh over and to suffer from now. The so-called practical 

 man is ever prone to entangle himself in and guide his conduct by 

 baseless speculations. Such has been the case with medicine. The 

 history of medicine in past centuries is largely occupied with the con- 

 flicts of contending schools of pathology — schools which arose from 

 this or that master putting forward a fancy, or a fragment of truth, 

 as the basis of all medical judgment. These have given place in the 

 present century to a rational pathology, which knows no school and 

 swears to the words of no master, but is slowly and surely unravel- 

 ing, bit by bit, the many separate tangled knots of disease. They 

 have given place because men have come to see that maladies can only 

 be mastered through a scientific comprehension of the nature of dis- 

 ease ; that pathology, the science of disease, being a part of, is insep- 

 able from, physiology, the science of life ; that the methods of both 

 are the same, for in each a sagacious observation starts an inquiry, 

 which a well-directed series of experiments brings to a successful end. 



Many, if not most, of these experiments must be made on living 

 beings. Hence it is that animals are killed and suffer pain, in order 

 that physiological knowledge may be increased, and disease made 

 less. 



Take away from the art of medicine all that with which physiology 

 has enriched it, and the surgeon or the physician of to-day would be 

 little better than a mystery-man, or a quack vender of chance-gotten 

 drugs. Take out of the present system of physiology all that has been 

 gained by experiments on living animals, and the whole structure 



