Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/163

 and to this third category or "community" they applied the term "mixtum." The ideas which are here stated in a somewhat crude and imperfect manner owing to my lack of knowledge of all the facts, constitute the basis of the pathology of the "Methodists"—a pathology which held its own in the domain of medicine during a period of four hundred years, and which—in contradistinction to the humoral pathology of Hippocrates—is justly entitled to the name of "solidist pathology." This doctrine, as might be expected, underwent certain modifications during this long period of time, but they were not serious enough to alter materially the fundamental form of the teaching as it has here been described.

Themison and his followers, like their distinguished predecessor, Asclepiades, possessed something more than a mere glimmering of the truth in pathology as we know it to-day; and this idea suggests the further thought that Morgagni, Rokitansky, Lebert, Virchow and perhaps others whose names do not now occur to me, could scarcely have developed a better pathology if they had lived during these first centuries of the Christian era—a period of time when public sentiment did not permit postmortem examinations, when Harvey's discovery was not even dreamed of, when the microscope was unknown, and when experimental pathology was an impossibility. Many centuries had still to elapse before medicine could gain that freedom of action, that rich equipment of tools, and that stock of accumulated knowledge which enable her in these days to make such giant strides forward as we have witnessed during the past twenty or thirty years.

The question will naturally arise, How did the Methodists decide, in the presence of an actual case of illness, which one of these abnormal states (the laxum, the strictum, or the mixtum) was the condition that called for medical treatment? The answer which they gave to this question was, that the condition of the different secretions and the dejections furnished the principal indication as to what particular part or organ of the body was ailing, and also as to what was the nature of the morbid change or process