Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/18

18 There is a science, and there is an art, of medicine, but the boundary line between them is not always clearly defined: for although we may arbitrarily separate the one from the other, it is evident that while both are independent in their nature, each tends to throw light upon the other—the science upon the art, by enabling us to group together empirical facts in an order and arrangement which makes both the science and the art more intelligible; and the art upon the science, by providing it with a wider basis of facts for induction, and by tending through clinical experience to rectify the errors inseparable from the application of normal to abnormal laws. The familiar anecdote, whether it be literally true or not, which relates that the law of gravitation was revealed to Newton by the fall of an apple, or that other equally striking story that the oscillation of a chandelier suggested to Galileo the orbit of the planets, serves to show that in the portion of the domain of knowledge, where the laws are unchangeable, a sagacious mind may leap from a single fact to a boundless generalization. But this rapid and intuitive faculty is always inborn, one of those mental operations that we attribute to genius, and which is unknown to the average mind. It is like the power to declare the result of arithmetical calculations more rapidly than they can be worked out by the most expert accountant. No calculating prodigy has ever been able to describe the process by which such astonishing results are reached; and, strange to say, these natural arithmeticians have generally been otherwise quite undistinguished either as mathematicians or in the common business of life. Sometimes, indeed, they have ceased to possess their phenomenal faculty on attaining adult age. In practical affairs, and conspicuously in practical medicine, this instinctive faculty is apt to be designated as common sense, and, when habitually exercised upon concrete facts, and not upon abstract numbers, is rendered stronger and more manageable by time and exercise, and those who possess it are looked up to as wise men in their several spheres, and are appealed to in doubtful cases. They possess an authority which they have derived not from science alone, nor from experience alone. Not infrequently they give wise and just opinions, the reasons for which they are unable satisfactorily to state. Their faculty is innate, however it may be perfected by use, just as the surgeon's hand, however adroit by nature, grows incomparably more so by practice. The talent for acquiring languages, which is so conspicuous in a few rare and phenomenal cases, was carried to an extreme limit in the case of Cardinal Mezzofanti, who is reported to