Page:The Harveian oration (electronic resource) - Royal College of Physicians, 1881 (IA b20411911).pdf/11

 country of ours, as we draw on towards the end of the nineteenth century, when we find the sustaining treatment in enteric fever pushed to such an extreme that the alimentary canal becomes over loaded with undigested aliment, and the consequent tympanitic distension of the bowel bursts the slender bonds, which have hitherto saved from rupture the thinned walls of a deep ulcer, and the patient from a fatal peritonitis? Alas! medical science is ever bending the knee to the idols of fashion and prejudice, forgetful of her high mission, to seek after and follow only the truth.

I think we may trace, in the method in which Harvey first propounded his views, a very early attempt at the inductive mode of reasoning associated with the name of Bacon, which was then but in its infancy. In the light of further knowlege, the discovery of the circulation must be regarded as one of the most brilliant examples of that philosophy, surpassed perhaps only by Newton's magnificent discovery of the laws of gravitation, some seventy years later. All of these great thinkers were working on the same lines; embued with the same spirit; each alike casting aside the dry logic of the schoolmen, which was once replete with life, but had become in their hands an almost unintelligible jargon.

In the recent revival of medical science-based, as it has been, on pathological research-one of