Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/25

Rh relied with confidence require material modification. Herein the laws of life differ widely from the laws of dead matter. Herein medical science diverges most from medical art in which a wise and clinically taught practitioner becomes more valuable to his patients and to the community than the most accomplished pathologist or the most consummate adept in experimental therapeutics. Our art is personal and individual in its application; and, however wide the field from which we may derive our knowledge and our skill in exercising it, we can never employ aright its vast resources unless we are able to gather them all together and apply them not only to a particular form of fever, inflammation, or degeneration, but also, and above all, adapt them to the individual man, woman, or child for whom we exercise the office of a physician.

Let me further illustrate the relations between the science and the art of medicine. However we may explain it or attempt to justify it, there can be no doubt that in all ages and nations, in Eastern lands, in Egypt and Greece, and in the countries that inherited their knowledge, there have always been two classes in the community—one that governed and one that obeyed; one that knew and one that only believed; one acquainted with the laws of nature, the other only familiar with their practical effects; one governed by princplesprinciples [sic], the other by the letter of the laws; one forever striving after a knowledge of causes, the other as constantly concerned with particular facts alone. Thus there was and is a science of religion to which no single form of religious belief or ceremonial every conformed; a science of law which is far from being practically regarded as much as precedents and statutes are; and a science of medicine which has as little direct application to the art of healing as creeds have to morality or the administration of laws to the principles of jurisprudence. There may be morality under pagan faiths as there is crime and licentiousness under the most elevated religious beliefs; and there were wise, skilful, and successful therapeutists before the discovery of the circulation of the blood, or of the structure or functions of the nervous system, or any accurate knowledge of the functions of a single organ had been acquired. I said a moment ago that there were successful therapeutists before the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and I venture to emphasize the statement that this supreme anatomical and physiological fact has had little direct bearing upon the healing art. In a letter of Thomas Jefferson is stated what appears to me the truth upon this point, in the following words: "Harvey's discovery of the