Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/372

368 the employment of any course of physical or chemical treatment, or of anything in the whole of his armamentarium? Yet the public are rarely told any of these wholesale truths but are rather left to speculate that each medical and surgical fact sprang forth as a kind of revelation in the inner consciousness of some past genius in medicine or surgery, who, in some occult way, knew of his own certain foreknowledge what would be the definite effect of some remedy or course of treatment before he tried it for the first time on a patient, or perhaps had the ethical conscience and genuine humanity to test it on a lower animal before he administered it to man.

It may, in short, be taken as an axiom of medical science that everything of value in medicine and surgery has arisen from the applications of experimental research. Nor can future advance be made by any other method than the research method. It is true that accident may teach occasionally, as it did, for example, in the dreadful burns unwittingly inflicted on themselves and patients by the early experimenters in X-ray therapy and diagnosis. But accident is only the most blundering type of experimentation, and results obtained by its chance agency do not really invalidate the universal law that man only learns by experience or, in other words, by research. Research is, after all, only the acquisition of fresh experience by the trained expert, usually led on to his experiment by inductance from other known facts.

It has been said above that all that is valuable in medical science has been acquired by research; the converse may now be pointed out, that much that was valueless, dangerous, and even disgusting in medicine in earlier days was incorporated into the medical lore of the time and often remained there for generations stealing lives by thousands because physicians had not yet adopted the research method, and so based their practise upon ignorant and unfounded convention. It is noticeable in literature that up to somewhere in the beginning of the nineteenth century physicians and surgeons were often as a class looked upon by scholars and educated people with a certain amount of contempt. There were notable and fine exceptions in all ages, but, taken as a whole, the profession of medicine was not held in that high esteem and admiration that it is amongst all classes to-day. Take, for example, Burns's picture of Dr. Hornbook or Sterne's account of Dr. Slop in "Tristram Shandy," and similar examples in plenty are to be found in the Continental literature. The reason for the change is to be found in the comparative growth of medical science as a result of the research method. The physicians of those days were very often ignorant quacks employing the most disgusting and dangerous remedies, or methods of treatment, based upon no experimental knowledge and handed own in false tradition from ignorant master to ignorant and often almost illiterate apprentice. It is only necessary to peruse the volumes written