Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/125

Rh men" in those days who received the work with scant favor. They boasted that they read nothing; that all available knowledge was the product of experience only. They sneered at museum doctors, and said that such were not fit to doctor a cat.

But Boerhaave's greatest glory was the prominence he gave to clinical instruction. Instead of aimless wandering through the hospital wards, he adopted the plan of examining few patients, but with them to be exact, thorough, and exhaustive. At the bedside he taught with great minuteness the conditions that prevail in health, and then the changes wrought by disease, and upon these data he proceeded to formulate his therapeusis. Under him the post-mortem room assumed the same importance as the library, the chemical laboratory, the dissecting room, and the botanical gardens. His pupils in other lands established clinics and clinical instruction in conformity with the precedents he established. The clinical schools of Edinburgh and Vienna, under the guidance of Cullen and Van Swieten, owe their glory to his transplanted spirit.

His system of treatment, like that of Sydenham and Hippocrates, comprised few remedies, and laid great stress upon hygiene. He had little faith in the prevailing elixirs ad longam vitam. "As to nostrums," he says, "let those who have them keep them till they can convince impartial observers of their real worth." In a footnote to this, Burton, who was his Boswell and worshiper, says, "Mrs. Stephens' saponaceous dissolvent for stone in the kidneys and bladder may be a proof of one of them."

In 1718 he accepted, in addition to his other public positions, the professorship of chemistry, then left vacant by the death of Le Mort. In 1738 he published his Elements of Chemistry. It is divided into three parts. The first is historical, and is full of curious learning; the second part presents Boerhaave's theoretical views; while in the third part the author's personal observations are given. These are chiefly of interest as showing the volume of useless experimentation that preceded solid advances in chemical science.

As a sample of old-time ways, Burton, with loving admiration, details Boerhaave's attempt to accomplish the consummate purification of quicksilver. "With matchless perseverance he tortured it by conquassation, trituration, digestion, and by distillation. He amalgamated it with lead, tin, or gold, repeating this operation to 511 or even to 877 distillations." But alas! owing to an inherent turpitude in the metal, at the end it was only the same quicksilver as at the beginning.

That this and similar experiences were not satisfactory to Boerhaave is evident from his preface. The work, he complains, was produced at the instance of his friends, and because of