Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/703

Rh results or theories, it has not seldom happened that the remedies, though useful, have been given for a wrong reason, or have done good in a way which was not expected.

But if we look upon the medical profession as a body of men, cunning to detect the nature and to forecast the issues of the bodily ills under which we suffer, skillful in the use of means to avoid or to lessen those ills, rich in resources whereby pain is diminished and dangerous maladies artfully guided to a happy end, then we owe physiology many and great debts. Did the reader ever suffer, or witness others suffer, with subsequent relief, a severe surgical operation? If so, let him revere the name of John Hunter, the father of modern surgery. But Hunter was emphatically a physiologist; his surgery was but the carrying into practice of physiological ideas, many of which were got by experiments on living animals. Does the reader know that in all great surgical operations there are moments of imminent danger lest life steal away in gushes of blood from the divided vessels, danger now securely met by ligatures scientifically and deftly tied? Does he know that there was a time when the danger was imperfectly met by hot searing-irons and other rude means, and that the introduction of ligatures, with their proper application, is due to experiments, cruel experiments, if you like, on dogs and other dumb animals, experiments eminently physiological in their nature, about which much may be read in the book of "Jones on Hæmorrhage?" Even now, year by year, the scientific surgeon, by experiments on animals, is at once adding to physiological knowledge and bettering his treatment of wounded or diseased arteries. Has the reader seen any one once stricken by paralysis, or bowed down by some nervous malady, yet afterward made whole and brought back to fair, if not vigorous, health? The advice which turned such a one toward recovery was based on knowledge originally drawn from the vivisectional experiments of physiologists, and made safe by matured experience. Or has he watched any dear friend fading away in that terrible malady diabetes, after rejoicing that for a season he seemed to be gathering strength and ceasing to fail, even if not regaining health? The only gleam of light into that mysterious disease which we possess, came from the vivisectional researches of Claude Bernard on the formation of glycogen in the liver; and by judiciously acting upon the results of those researches the skillful physician can sometimes stay its ravages. He cannot cure it even now; and unless some empiric remedy be found by chance, will never cure it, until, by the death of many animals in the physiological laboratory, the mystery of the glycogenic function of the liver be cleared up.

But why need I go on adding one special benefit to another? They may all be summed up in one sentence, which embodies the whole relation of physiology to the medical profession.

The art of medicine is the science of physiology applied to detailed