IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
19 
gen ray, used by physicians in almost every town of size 
in Iowa within less than half a decade of its discovery. 
The debt of the healing art to the sciences of the bio- 
logic group is so vast that I will select but one, bacteriol- 
ogy, for illustration. It is to no lucky chance that the 
discovery is due of man’s most subtle and deadly foes, the 
bacteria. The work of Pasteur, the pioneer, and of his 
illustrious followers, is marked by the most thorough and 
painstaking investigation, and the most searching and 
rigid tests. It is by the application of the scientific 
method that the enemy has been unmasked, his ambus- 
cades and chosen places for assault discovered, and ra- 
tional methods for his destruction demonstrated. It is 
men of science who have organized the victory of medi- 
cine today over diphtheria, rabies, and the plague, over 
the venom of the snake and all the diseases to which 
serum therapathy is successfully applied. And where the 
bacteriologist cannot as yet supply a specific for disease, he 
can often point the way to its prevention. When the access 
to the human system of the germs of typhoid and chol- 
era by drinking water is demonstrated, Hamburg builds its 
filter beds at a cost of $2,280,000, and Chicago expends $33,- 
000,000 upon the drainage canal. And so with the great 
white plague, tubercular consumption. Science has proved 
the lurking-places of the contagion in the sputum, and. its 
carriage in the air we breathe; and reinforced by the high 
moral sense of our people, she is fast making it as impos- 
sible for the consumptive to spit on the pavement unhin- 
dered as for the small pox patient to walk unarrested down 
our streets. 
And who can estimate the number of lives now saved in 
each generation by aseptic surgery? So long as putrefac- 
tion was held, as by Liebig, to be due to the action of the 
oxygen of the air, no remedy for it could be suggested. 
But when once its bacterial origin was proven, the step 
was inevitable to those precautions which have rendered 
safe and successful the marvellous operations of modern 
surgery. 
