Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/5

Rh often it was held to be more meritorious to be wrong with the Galen than to be right with nature.

An eminent man (De Tocqueville) has said that "in democracies general propositions are popular because they save the trouble of thinking." But their popularity is assuredly as great elsewhere, and for the same reason. In medicine they dispense physicians from that laborious research without which no substantial and lasting results can be reached. And when they are set forth with the fascinating art of speculative genius they draw around them a crowd of disciples who shrink from the slow and toilsome pursuit of the highest truth. So unsubstantial comets in their eccentric paths arouse more wonder than the stars, and the planets which move steadily and forever in their fixed orbits and give light and life to the universe. But during the dark ages in the history of medicine it must not be supposed that the darkness was complete; the night was illuminated by many stars that more or less guided minds strong enough to burst the shackles of conjectural systems, and which heralded the dawn that was ultimately to break upon every field of knowledge, and cause its hidden seeds to germinate and grow and bring forth fruit. Infinite pains and skill were needed to render its fruit palatable and nutritious—pains that no one man nor many generations could furnish, and which must be suffered to the very end of time. Every age, every generation, almost every period of a few years has witnessed greater or less changes in the doctrines, the principles, and the practice of medicine. If they are less ostensible and radical now than during the ages of inflexible theory and blind faith, if they come into view more gradually and gently, and grow distinct only through the lapse of time, it is because practical medicine is no longer so exclusively as it was the outcome of conjecture and speculation which reached their conclusions with a bound, but is rather a slow and vital growth of positive knowledge. The last resort in mooted questions is no longer authority which is individual and limited in power; appeal is made to the great Areopagus of learned and scientific men throughout the world. The word heretic (which really denotes no more than one who exercises his right of believing what he will—that is, the right of private judgment) is no longer the term of reproach and humiliation which for long ages it continued to be. Then it brought down the thunders of learned bodies, and blasted scientific free thinkers as effectually as did the fulminations of the Church the unhappy wretches who maintained their right to believe what their senses revealed to them and their