Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/11

 of those forces by the conversion of dead matter into living tissue. This and vastly more it is the tendency of medical studies to do; it is all implicitly included in them, and of no others can the same be so truly said. If the physician often fails to attain the height which these statements imply, the fault, even in the case of the most gifted and zealous, is in his finite powers, the shortness of life, and the thousand human cares which harass his career. But none the less has he a field to explore incomparably wider and more varied and interesting than lies before any other searcher after knowledge, and so far as he can become acquainted with it will he find his own happiness increase and his power of doing good.

It need not be concealed that this knowledge is inexact in the precise proportion of its vastness. Medical science possesses no creed contained in a few sentences, nor strictly defined principles like law, nor a short list of axioms and postulates like mathematics. Such philosophical conciseness cannot be used in describing the phenomena of organic nature. Life manifestations are, indeed, hedged in by extreme limits which cannot be transgressed. A striking peculiarity of living beings is the unlikeness of individuals, since no two of them, whether leaves, or flowers, or features, or organs, or the functions, whether mental, moral, or physical, or the diseases which derange these organs and functions, are ever identical with one another. It is this unlikeness, this variety, that imparts to animated nature its highest charm. We admire and love it instinctively, while sameness of form and condition affect us with weariness, like monotony of sound. It almost seems as if this aversion to uniformity were implanted in us for the very purpose of stimulating us to search and learn forever, that we might stretch forward to grasp all knowledge in the world, and even beyond it in the world to come. The contemplation of nature discloses no such monotony; it does not exist in medicine, which embraces so large a portion of her realm. The physician may glean knowledge from every field. He discerns health or sickness in the sunshine and the shade; in the winds that breathe pestilence, or that come with healing under their wings. It is he that tolls us which are the waters that