in its Relations to Physiology. 425 



The questions upon which everything at present hinges are these : 

 Are the methods of inquiry and research hitherto in use for the appre- 

 hension of the mysterious processes of life incapable of improvement? 

 Are not these methods rather antiquated and worn out? Are they 

 really able to put us in possession of the results we covet? Can we 

 rationally expect that they will yet furnish us with solutions of the 

 many problems still remaining with respect to the functions of the 

 most important organs in the animal economy ? Will they ever teach 

 us the nature of inflammation or of fever ? 



No one who looks attentively at the progress of medicine during the 

 last hundred years, can fail of being convinced, that while there has 

 always existed a most earnest desire for a clearer insight into the vital 

 processes, and a more accurate knowledge of the causes exercising a 

 disturbing influence upon them ; that while abundant energies have 

 been directed toward the attainment of the highest aim of the science, 

 there has hitherto been an hiatus which it is necessary should be filled 

 up, a connecting link to the disjointed observations, and which must of 

 necessity be supplied ere a more extensive and profound knowledge of 

 the mysteries of organic nature can be attainable. The information we 

 are in quest of is, what are the other forces of nature which co-operate 

 with the vital principle in producing and sustaining the manifestations 

 of life, the processes continually going on in all living organisms? 



The inability to distinguish, and separate from each other, various 

 effects in complex phenomena, render it impossible to refer each es- 

 pecial effect to its true cause. Hence the brilliant discoveries of com- 

 parative anatomy and physiology, which have enriched these sciences 

 more in the course of a few decades of years than the labours of a thou- 

 sand years previously, have exercised but a slight influence upon 

 medicine. 



All great pathologists, all the more intelligent physiologists, have from 

 the beginning clearly and distincly recognised chemistry as the great 

 desideratum — the needed link — and they have attempted the solution of 

 the several problems presented them with such scanty and insufficient 

 means as chemistry afforded in its infancy, and in the various stages of 

 its development. Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and Sylvius — chiefs in 

 their age — attempted to apply the experience of chemistry to medi- 

 cine, they referred all the physiological, pathological, and therapeutical 

 knowledge which tbey possessed to chemical principles. But they re- 

 garded the fluids of the animal body exclusively, they bestowed the 

 suffrage, in physiological and pathological questions, to them, to the 

 entire disregard of the solid parts of the organism, and all the changes 



