Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/56

46 only homage is the health and beauty of the children who play around his statue.

But, after all, it is not so much by direct and immediate contributions to the art of healing that Physiology has vindicated her ancient title of the institutes of medicine, numerous and important as these contributions have been. It is still more by the scientific spirit which has transformed the empty learning so justly ridiculed by Molière and Le Sage into the practical efficiency of modern surgery. Let me give an instance of what I mean. The notion of measuring the temperature of the body is simple enough, and the rough observation that in inflammation the temperature is raised had led to the various terms by which it was denoted in ancient medicine, and to numberless theories now happily forgotten. But although the thermometer was well known, and had been applied by many scientific physicians, notably by De Haen, by Dr. John Davy, and by Sir Benjamin Brodie, yet the practical value of the clinical thermometer which now every practitioner carries in his pocket was not understood until the other day. Those only who had been trained in accurate physical and physiological investigations, who had learned the worse than uselessness of "rough observation," were able to see the enormous importance of clinical thermometry. This most practical of modern improvements in medicine would never have been dreamed of by "practical men"; we owe it to the scientific training of German laboratories.

If physiology is of such great national importance, if the necessity of experimental research is so vital to the common national wealth, to agriculture and commerce, to health and well-being, ought not its well ascertained results to be taught in our common schools, and its prosecution directly encouraged by the state?

There is no question of the great importance of children being taught the rudimentary laws of health, the bodily evils of dirt and sloth and vice, the excellence of temperance, the danger of the first inroads of disease. Such teaching, now broadcast in many excellent manuals, as "The Personal Care of Health," by the late Dr. Parkes, and Dr. Bridges's "Catechism of Health," is no doubt extremely valuable, and happily is daily more and more diffused. But when beyond the direct utility of such knowledge we attempt to make it an intellectual discipline, there are, I conceive, difficulties which will always prevent even elementary physiology from forming an important part of general education. First, there is the practical difficulty of the necessary dissections; next, the impossibility of making physiology demonstrative; and, thirdly, the abstruseness of the subject. It is impossible to have even an elementary knowledge of the laws of living beings without a very considerable familiarity with those of physics and of chemistry, and even in medical schools it requires all our efforts to prevent it degenerating into a mere dogmatic statement of