Page:The Harveian oration, 1893.djvu/52

28 region, and the motor, sensory and trophic changes which physiologically ensue.

Sometimes this minute search to fix upon the locality and exact nature of a lesion has been ridiculed; and we are asked what benefit to the patient such knowledge when attained can bring. We answer, that in Medicine, as in every other practical art, progress depends upon knowledge, and knowledge must be pursued for its own sake, without continually looking about for its practical application.

Harvey’s great discovery (which we Physicians rightly celebrate this day) was a strictly physiological discovery, and had little influence upon the healing art until the invention of auscultation. So also Dubois Reymond’s investigation of the electrical properties of muscle and nerve was purely scientific, but we use the results thus obtained every day in the diagnosis of disease, in