Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/310

306 medical performer of his time, Hahnemann, is reported to have said that two thirds of all diseases have this origin, 'they are the itch struck-in.' But a little knowledge of entomology with a hand lens has abolished the disease. Itch no longer 'strikes in' and nothing is more easily cured. Meanwhile the internal disorders called itch are being treated each in its own way.

The progress in medicine has been in proportion to its dependence on science and the scientific method. Science is human experience tested and set in order. Progress through science means simply learning through experience and taking pains to sift and test experience.

I need not speak of the details of this progress. Surgery is applied anatomy; antisepsis is applied bacteriology; pharmacology is applied chemistry; with instruments of precision, wonderful progress is made in the interpretation of experience. There is nothing in the history of science more suggestive than the simultaneous lights thrown on bacteria and microbes from many quarters at once. Lister with his clean knives and antiseptic surgery, Bastian trying to prove the spontaneous generation of infusoria in vegetable broths; Tyndall trying to clear his tubes from floating particles in the air which break up the rays of light, Pasteur with his blighted silk-worms—all these men were at work at the same problem—each with his varied instruments of precision, and the final result of all, the theory of fermentation, putrefaction, antisepsis and contagious diseases. Our knowledge of the minute organisms all about us, as real, as helpful or as harmful as the larger creatures of the earth, but the whole beyond the reach of the unaided senses.

With this knowledge, we have a new birth of the art of medicine. When we know our enemies, we can fight them intelligently. The progress of medicine, its achievements and discoveries being granted, how shall we teach it?

There should be advance in methods of teaching as well as in methods of gaining and testing facts. In the old days we had the method of apprenticeship. The little doctor saw what the big one did and followed his method. He learned to say the magic word, to make the magic passes, to brew the magic drug, to say more than he knows and to know more than he says.

In the ancient universities, the lecture was an exercise in dictation, the student taking word for word the wise phrases of the master. The ancient wizardry still prevails in some of our forms of medico-religious healing; the ancient belief in simples and signatory remedies, in our patent medicine trade. With ignorant people, the mysteries of