2i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Most of their teaching was quite untrue — 

 Look at the stars when a patient is ill, 



(Dirt has nothing to do with disease) — 

 Bleed and blister as much as you will, 



Bleed and blister as much as you please. 11 



Paracelsus, who originated the treatment of syphilis with mercu- 

 rials, made a brave stand for chemical therapeutics in the sixteenth 

 century, but there could be no scientific treatment of disease without 

 accurate knowledge of physiology, pathology and clinical diagnosis. 

 Harvey's physical demonstration of the circulation of the blood awoke 

 experimental physiology from the sleep of fifteen centuries, but had to 

 wait upon the specialization of laboratory physics and chemistry for 

 its further advancement. Modern chemistry began with Priestley's 

 discovery of oxygen and Lavoisier's introduction of the balance. Phys- 

 ical diagnosis began to be a science with the inventions and discoveries 

 of Auenbrugger (percussion), Laennec (stethoscope and mediate aus- 

 cultation), Louis (statistical interpretation), Skoda (physics of chest 

 diseases), and Wunderlich (clinical thermometry). The therapeutics 

 of ordinary ailments became more refined but the treatment of specific 

 infections could not be setiological before the development of cellular 

 pathology by Virchow, of bacteriology by Pasteur and Koch, of medical 

 parasitology by Manson, Laveran, Eoss, Eeed, Stiles and Schaudinn. 

 In the eighteenth century medicine had been an affair of theories and 

 systems, and in each instance the treatment was dominated by the par- 

 ticular view of the nature of disease — Boerhaave's, Haller's, Brown's, 

 Cullen's or Hahnemann's. Homoeopathy, 12 the most dogmatic and 

 fantastic of these, illustrates the trend of drug therapy for over a 

 hundred years — the tendency to treat symptoms rather than to remove 

 the cause. About the middle of the nineteenth century we come to the 

 so-called " therapeutic nihilism " of Vienna, in which practise degen- 

 erated into simple diagnosis. This was mainly due to the influence 

 and example of Skoda, an unrivalled diagnostician, but incidentally a 

 whimsical, lop-sided Czech, who claimed that although we can diagnose 

 and describe disease, "we dare not expect by any means to cure it." 

 Great as Skoda's scientific attainments were, his influence upon thera- 

 peutics was wholly pernicious, and it became a sort of by-word in 

 Vienna that to be auscultated by Skoda was a possible prelude to being 



"Rudyard Kipling, "Rewards and Fairies," Doubleday, Page & Co., New 

 York, 1910, pp. 281, 282. 



12 Although Hahnemann's " Organon " was published in 1810, he began to 

 practise about 1799, and his theory of therapeutics, with its attempt at sys- 

 tematization, is fairly characteristic of the eighteenth century. Homoeopathy 

 has had some good effect upon therapeutics in lowering the scale of dosage of 

 drugs. In the inscription upon the pedestal of Hahnemann's statue at Wash- 

 ington, the original dogmatic universal affirmative " Similia similibus curantur " 

 has been softened down to the tentative implications of the subjunctive mood: 

 " Similia similibus curentur." 



