The Evolution of Modern Medicine [88]
that medicine today runs in larger moulds and turns out finer castings is due to his life and work. It is one of the values of lectures on the history of medicine to keep alive the good influences of great men even after their positive teaching is antiquated. Let no man be so foolish as to think that he has exhausted any subject for his generation. Virchow was not happy when he saw the young men pour into the old bottle of cellular pathology the new wine of bacteriology. Lister could never understand how aseptic surgery arose out of his work. Ehrlich would not recognize his epoch-making views on immunity when this generation has finished with them. I believe it was Hegel who said that progress is a series of negations--the denial today of what was accepted yesterday, the contradiction by each generation of some part at least of the philosophy of the last; but all is not lost, the germ plasm remains, a nucleus of truth to be fertilized by men often ignorant even of the body from which it has come. Knowledge evolves, but in such a way that its possessors are never in sure possession. "It is because science is sure of nothing that it is always advancing" (Duclaux).
History is the biography of the mind of man, and its educational value is in direct proportion to the completeness of our study of the individuals through whom this mind has been manifested. I have tried to take you back to the beginnings of science, and to trace its gradual development, which is conditioned by three laws. In the first place, like a living organism, truth grows, and its gradual evolution may be traced from the tiny germ to the mature product. Never springing, Minerva-like, to full stature at once, truth may suffer all the hazards incident to generation and gestation. Much of history is a record of the mishaps of truths which have struggled to the birth, only to die or else to wither in premature decay. Or the germ may be dormant for centuries, awaiting the fullness of time.
Secondly, all scientific truth is conditioned by the state of knowledge at the time of its announcement. Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the science of optics and mechanical appliances had not made possible (so far as the human mind was concerned) the existence of blood capillaries and blood corpuscles. Jenner could not have added to his "Inquiry" a study on immunity; Sir William Perkin and the chemists made Koch technique possible; Pasteur gave the conditions that produced Lister; Davy and others furnished the preliminaries necessary for anaesthesia. Everywhere we find this filiation, one event following the other in orderly sequence--"Mind begets mind," as Harvey (De Generatione) says; "opinion is the source of opinion. Democritus with his atoms, and Eudoxus with his chief good which he placed in pleasure, impregnated Epicurus; the four elements of Empedocles, Aristotle; the doctrines of the ancient Thebans, Pythagoras and Plato; geometry, Euclid."[2]
[2] Works of William Harvey, translated by Robert Willis, London, 1847, p. 532.
And, thirdly, to scientific truth alone may the homo mensura principle be applied, since of all mental treasures of the race it alone compels general acquiescence. That this general acquiescence, this aspect of certainty, is not reached per saltum, but is of slow, often of difficult growth,--marked by failures and frailties, but crowned at last with an acceptance accorded to no other product of mental activity,--is illustrated by every important discovery from Copernicus to Darwin.
The difficulty is to get men to the thinking level which compels the application of scientific truths. Protagoras, that "mighty-wise man," as Socrates called him, who was responsible for the aphorism that man is the measure of all things, would have been the first to recognize the folly of this standard for the people at large. But we have gradually reached a stage in which knowledge is translated into action, made helpful for suffering humanity, just as the great discoveries in physics and chemistry have been made useful in the
History is the biography of the mind of man, and its educational value is in direct proportion to the completeness of our study of the individuals through whom this mind has been manifested. I have tried to take you back to the beginnings of science, and to trace its gradual development, which is conditioned by three laws. In the first place, like a living organism, truth grows, and its gradual evolution may be traced from the tiny germ to the mature product. Never springing, Minerva-like, to full stature at once, truth may suffer all the hazards incident to generation and gestation. Much of history is a record of the mishaps of truths which have struggled to the birth, only to die or else to wither in premature decay. Or the germ may be dormant for centuries, awaiting the fullness of time.
Secondly, all scientific truth is conditioned by the state of knowledge at the time of its announcement. Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the science of optics and mechanical appliances had not made possible (so far as the human mind was concerned) the existence of blood capillaries and blood corpuscles. Jenner could not have added to his "Inquiry" a study on immunity; Sir William Perkin and the chemists made Koch technique possible; Pasteur gave the conditions that produced Lister; Davy and others furnished the preliminaries necessary for anaesthesia. Everywhere we find this filiation, one event following the other in orderly sequence--"Mind begets mind," as Harvey (De Generatione) says; "opinion is the source of opinion. Democritus with his atoms, and Eudoxus with his chief good which he placed in pleasure, impregnated Epicurus; the four elements of Empedocles, Aristotle; the doctrines of the ancient Thebans, Pythagoras and Plato; geometry, Euclid."[2]
[2] Works of William Harvey, translated by Robert Willis, London, 1847, p. 532.
And, thirdly, to scientific truth alone may the homo mensura principle be applied, since of all mental treasures of the race it alone compels general acquiescence. That this general acquiescence, this aspect of certainty, is not reached per saltum, but is of slow, often of difficult growth,--marked by failures and frailties, but crowned at last with an acceptance accorded to no other product of mental activity,--is illustrated by every important discovery from Copernicus to Darwin.
The difficulty is to get men to the thinking level which compels the application of scientific truths. Protagoras, that "mighty-wise man," as Socrates called him, who was responsible for the aphorism that man is the measure of all things, would have been the first to recognize the folly of this standard for the people at large. But we have gradually reached a stage in which knowledge is translated into action, made helpful for suffering humanity, just as the great discoveries in physics and chemistry have been made useful in the