Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/371

Rh There are two essentials in the inception of this organized campaign against disease on a scientific basis. The first is to demonstrate clearly to the public mind that modern scientific medicine arose from the experimental or research method, that it was only when experimental observation of the laws of health and disease, in animals and man, commenced on an organized and broadcast basis that medicine and surgery leaped forward and the remarkable achievements of the past fifty years began. Also that it is only by the organization and endowment of medical research that future discovery and advancement are possible. The second essential is to convince the public that a national system must be evolved placing medical science and medical practise in coordination, so that the discoveries of science may be adequately applied in an organized scheme for the prevention and treatment of disease. The method in which discoveries have been made in the past suggests an amplification and organization along similar lines for the future, and the banishment of many diseases by public health work in the past suggests that it is more efficiently organized and widespread public health work in the future, extended from the physical environment to the infecting individual, that will be most fruitful in banishing other diseases.

If it be queried by any one here, what has physiology to do with disease, it may be replied that the question comes at least fifty years too late. The methods evolved first by physiologists in experimentation upon animals have become the methods of all the exact sciences in medicine. Bacteriology is the physiology of the bacterium, and the study of protozoan diseases the physiology of certain groups of protozoa, Organo-therapy had its origin in physiology, and many of its most brilliant discoveries were made by physiologists, and all by scientists who used physiological methods. Serum therapy, experimental pharmacology, and the great problems of immunity all arose from the labors of men with expert training in physiology who branched out into practical applications achieved by the extension of the experimental, or research, method. The modern methods of medical diagnosis and the brilliant technique of contemporary surgery, what has opened the door to these but the experimental method? From the days of the first successful abdominal operation to the present day research in laboratory or in the operating theater has pioneered the way, and the sooner this simple truth is known to all men the better for medical science. Every time any surgeon first tries a new operation there is in it an element of experiment and research of which the ethical limits are well-known and definable, and any person who logically thinks the matter out must see that it is the research method which has placed the science and art of surgery where it stands to-day. Exactly the same thesis holds for medicine. How could any physician predict for the first time, before he had tried it experimentally on animal or man, the action of any new drug, the effect of any variation in dosage, the result of any dietary, of