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SCIENCE. 



not confined to its use as an article of diet, because 

 for all purposes for which water is employed, the purer 

 it is, the better it is adapted for use. 



THE CONNECTION OF THE BIOLOGICAL 

 SCIENCES WITH MEDICINE* 

 By T. H. Huxley, LL.D. 



"The great man whose name is inseparably connected 

 with the foundation of medicine, Hippocrates certainly 

 knew very little — indeed, practically nothing — of anatomy 

 or physiology ; and he would probably have been per- 

 plexed even to imagine the possibility of a connection be- 

 tween the zoological studies of his contemporary, De- 

 mocritus, and medicine. Nevertheless, in so far as he 

 and those who worked before and after him in the same 

 spirit ascertained, as matters of experience, that a wound 

 or a luxation, or a fever, presented such and such 

 symptoms, and that the return of the patient to health 

 was facilitated by such and such measures, they estab- 

 lished laws of Nature and began the construction of the 

 science of pathology. All true science begins with empiri- 

 cism, though all true science is such exactly in so far as it 

 strives to pass out of the empirical stage into that of the 

 deduction of empirical from more general truths. Thus, 

 it is not wonderful that the early physicians had little or 

 nothing to do with the development of biological science ; 

 and, on the other hand, that the early biologists did not 

 much concern themselves with medicine. There is noth- 

 ing to show that the Asclepiads took any prominent 

 share in the work of founding anatomy, physiology, zoo- 

 logy and botany. Rather do these seem to have sprung 

 from the early philosophers, who were essentially natural 

 philosophers, animated by the characteristically Greek 

 thirst for knowledge as such. Pythagoras, Alcmason, 

 Democritus, Diogenes of Apollonia, are all credited with 

 anatomical and physiological investigation ; and though 

 Aristotle is said to have belonged to an Asclepiad family, 

 and not improbably owed his taste for anatomical and 

 zoological inquiries to the teachings of his father, the 

 physician Nicomachus, the ' Historia Animalium,' and 

 the treatise ' De Partibus Animalium,' are as free from any 

 allusion to medicine as if they had issued from a modern 

 biological laboratory. 



" It may be added, that it is not easy to see in what 

 way it could have benefited a physician of Alex- 

 ander's time to know all that Aristotle knew on these 

 subjects. His human anatomy was too rough to 

 avail much in diagnosis, his physiology was too erroneous 

 to supply data for pathological reasoning. But when the 

 Alexandrian school, with Erasistratus and Herophilus at 

 their head, turned to account the opportunities of study- 

 ing human structure afforded to them by the Ptolemies, 

 the value of the large amount of accurate knowledge 

 thus obtained to the surgeon for his operations, and to 

 the physician for his diagnosis of internal disorders, be- 

 came obvious, and a connection was established between 

 anatomy and medicine, which has ever become closer and 

 closer. Since the revival of learning, surgery, medical 

 diagnosis, and anatomy have gone hand in hand. Mor- 

 gagni called his great work ' De Sedibus et Causis Mor- 

 borum per Anatomen Indagatis,' and not only showed 

 the way to search out the localities and the causes of dis- 

 ease by anatomy, but himself travelled wonderfully far 

 upon the road. Bichat, discriminating the grosser con- 

 stituents of the organs and parts of the body one from 

 another, pointed out the direction which modern research 

 must take ; until at length histology, a science of yester- 

 day, as it seems to many of us, has carried the work of 

 Morgagni as far as the microscope can take us, and has 

 extended the realm of pathological anatomy to the limits 

 of the invisible world. 



* International Medical Congress London, 1881. 



" Thanks to the intimate alliance of morphology with 

 medicine, the natural history of disease has, at the pres- 

 ent day, attained a high degree of perfection. Accurate 

 regional anatomy has rendered practicable the exploration 

 of the most hidden parts of the organism, and the deter- 

 mination during life of morbid changes in them ; anatomi- 

 cal and histological post-mortem investigations have sup- 

 plied physicians with a clear basis upon which to rest the 

 classification of diseases, and with unerring tests of the 

 accuracy or inaccuracy of their diagnosis. If men could 

 be satisfied with pure knowledge, the extreme precision 

 with which, in these days, a sufferer may be told what is 

 happening, and what is likely to happen, even in the most 

 recondite parts of his bodily frame, should be as satisfac- 

 tory to the patient as it is to the scientific pathologists 

 who gives him the information. But I am afraid it is not; 

 and even the practising physician, while nowise underes- 

 timating the regulative value of accurate diagnosis, must 

 often lament that so much of his knowledge rather pre- 

 vents him from doing wrong than helps him to do right. 

 A scorner of physic once said that Nature and disease 

 may be compared to two men fighting, the doctor to a 

 blind man with a club, who strikes into the tnilie some- 

 times hitting the disease and sometimes hitting all Nature. 

 The matter is not mended if you suppose the blind man's 

 hearing to be so acute that he can register every stage of 

 the struggle and pretty clearly predict how it will end. He 

 had better not meddle at all until his eyes are opened — until 

 he can see the exact position of the antagonists, and make 

 sure of the effects of his blows. But that which it be- 

 hooves the physician to see, not indeed with his bodily 

 eye, but with clear intellectual vision, is a process, and 

 the chain of causation involved in that process. Disease, 

 as we have seen, is a perturbation of the normal activities 

 of a living body ; and it is and must remain unintelligible 

 so long as we are ignorant of the nature of these normal 

 activities. In other words, there could be no real science 

 of pathology until the science of physiology had reached 

 a degree of perfection unattained, and indeed unattainable, 

 until quite recent times. 



" So far as medicine is concerned, I am not sure 

 that physiology, such as it was jiown to the time of 

 Harvey, might as well not have existed. Nay, it is, per- 

 haps, no exaggeration to say that, within the memory of 

 living men, justly renowned practitioners of medicine and 

 surgery knew less physiology than is now to be learned 

 from the most elementary text book, and, beyond a few 

 broad facts, regarded what they did know as of extremely 

 little practical importance. Nor am I disposed to blame 

 them for this conclusion ; physiology must be useless, or 

 worse than useless, to pathology, so long as its funda- 

 mental conceptions are erroneous. Harvey is often said 

 to be the founder of modern physiology, and there can be 

 no question that the elucidations of the function of the 

 heart, of the nature of the pulse, and of the course of the 

 blood, put forth in the ever-memorable little essay, ' De 

 motu cordis,' directly worked a revolution in men's views 

 of the nature and of the concatenation of some of the 

 most important physiological processes among the higher 

 animals, while indirectly their influence was perhaps even 

 more remarkable. But, though Harvey made this signal 

 and perennially important contribution to the physiology 

 of the moderns, his general conception of vital processes 

 was essentially identical with that of the ancients ; and 

 in the ' E.xercitationes de generatione,' and notably in the 

 singular chapter, ' De calido innato,' he shows himself a 

 true son of Galon and of Aristotle. For Harvey, the 

 blood possesses powers superior to those of the elements; 

 it is the seat of a soul which is not only vegetative, but 

 also sensitive and motor. The blood maintains and 

 fashions all parts of the body, idque summd cu?n firo- 

 videntia et intellectu, in finem certum agens, quasi 

 ratiocinio qitodam uterctur. Here is the doctrine of 

 the pneuma, the product of the philosophical mould into 

 which the animism of primitive men ran in Greece, in 



