Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/84

72 In no branch of this wide range of inquiry is painful experiment necessary.

Our homes, our industrial occupations, our legislative enactments, should all be guided by hygienic knowledge, and its diffusion should be actively encouraged by the community. Our hospitals and dispensaries need to promote practical hygiene. Our medical schools should turn the force of their learning ability and great influence to the conversion of their students into a vast body of sanitary missionaries. If our thousands of medical graduates turned out every year into practice could go forth inspired with enthusiasm for health, convinced that the preservation of health was their especial work, and that all disease must be regarded as a violation of the laws of health, a violation which it was their special duty to fight against; a mighty step in the advancement of medicine would be taken. The impulse to such progress should come from improved instruction in our medical schools, and in the management of our hospitals.

We much need also an unprejudiced and exhaustive history of the progress of biological inquiry since the Middle Ages, with its present