Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/374

370 and the scarcely less violent druggings with strong drugs have disappeared. The patient is less harassed by his doctor, who is more content to assist the natural processes of recuperation as his knowledge of applied physiology and hygiene teach him, rather than to thwart them and to lessen resistance as his predecessor often did a generation ago when he knew no physiology and less hygiene. Still, the comparison between the text-book of even forty years ago and one of the present day shows a wonderful advance, all flowing from the use of the research method in the intervening years, both in knowledge of the origins and in the treatments of the diseases.

Time and space forbid going into details, but the whole of serum, vaccine and organo-therapy were unknown, with the single exception of vaccination for variola. Enteric fever has been separated from typhus, but its etiology is still obscure, and, to a large extent as a consequence, the mortality from it is fifteen to sixteen per cent., or quadruple present-day figures, and it is one of the commonest of diseases. The cause of diphtheria is unknown, although it is now recognized as a "contagious" disease, and as yet research in bacteriology has supplied no cure for it. The unity of the various forms of tuberculosis is unsuspected, the infecting organism is unknown, and, as a result, it is not even recognized as an infectious disease and heredity figures most strongly in a dubious etiology leading up to a vacillating treatment. Pneumonia is not recognized as due to a microorganism, and is described as one of the "idiopathic" diseases. The cause of syphilis, and its relationship to tabes dorsalis, and general paralysis are unknown, and generally it may be said that the causes of disease are either entirely unknown or erroneously given in at least three quarters of the very incomplete list of diseases that are classified and described.

This, after all the centuries, was the doleful position of medical science in the year 1876, when suddenly light began to shine upon it, brought not by the agency of any member of the medical profession, but by a physiological chemist, and he was led to his great discovery, not in an attempt to solve some problem of practical medicine, but by scientific observations devoted to an apparently purely philosophical critical research into the supposed origin of life in a particular way.

It was the experimental or research method in biochemistry supported by physiological experiments on animals which in the hands of Louis Pasteur laid the foundations of true knowledge, and transformed medicine from what has been described above into the glorious, living, evolving science that we possess to-day.

The men who fought side by side with Pasteur in his famous struggle against orthodoxy in medicine as represented by the leading physicians and surgeons of the period between 1860 and 1880 were mainly chemists, biologists and physiologists, such as Claude Bernard, Paul Bert, J. B. Dumas, Biot, Belard and Sainte-Claire Deville, in his