Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/368

364 to have wider vision and abandon old theories and beliefs in the new-born light that makes the world better to-day than it was yesterday, and that also will show things up to our mental vision more clearly to-morrow than they stand out to-day. To the members of any great craft, or profession, or religious order, this scientific outlook which accepts as fundamental a progressive world and insists that its votaries should adapt their lives to such a doctrine, is peculiarly difficult of assimilation. Routine fixes all men, and so when any new discovery appears to demand change from that order to which the mind has become accustomed, it is immediately looked upon with suspicion, and there being little plasticity of mind remaining, it is rejected as heretical or revolutionary after but scanty critical examination. The cry of the craft in danger has been used efficaciously on many occasions since the days of the Ephesian silversmiths, nor is such a cry at once to be set down to pure selfishness. A craft is often worth preserving long after the forces which have called it into being have commenced to slumber, and conservatism of this type is at times an important factor in social progress. However, there are certain limits which must not be surpassed, room must be made by adaptation for the new knowledge, or it will establish a craft of its own iconoclastic to much worth preserving in the older system.

It is important to insist upon these limitations, because a too reactionary spirit abroad in medicine between 1860 and 1880 prevented the world from benefiting from those remarkable discoveries by Pasteur and their proposed applications by Lister, which laid the foundations of modern medicine and modern surgery. These pioneers of the new age in medical science had to wage for many years a stern and bitter fight against the strong forces of ignorance and prejudice. But for this illogical resistance by men who would not even test the new discoveries, and instead spent their time in sneering at the new geniuses who had leadership to give the world, France and Germany would have been saved many thousands of brave lives in the great war of 1870-71. Even thereafter, the slow struggle continued of the few who knew against the many who refused to be taught, and a perusal of any orthodox text-book of medicine published between 1875-80—that is, more than a decade after Pasteur's great discovery—will show that the etiology of scarcely a single infectious disease had become known, and that medical science was, for example, as ignorant of the nature of tuberculosis as we are to-day of the nature of carcinoma. Take, as an example, the following quotation from a well-known text-book of the theory and practise of medicine published in 1876: "It is now, however, generally admitted that tubercle is no mere deposit, but, on the contrary, a living growth as much as sarcoma and carcinoma are living growths." The tubercles were the only initial lesion observed, the infecting organism was entirely unknown, and the pathologists of this comparatively