Page:The healing art in its historic and prophetic aspects - the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, Oct. 19, 1885 (IA b21908199).pdf/22

 were attempted in relation to most other arts and sciences, the delusion would be at once detected, and the imposture duly denounced; whilst, in medicine, the delusion would, on the other hand, probably make the propounder's fame and fortune, and in the course of years be forgotten.

'Truly we may say with Crabbe - This love of life, which in our nature rules, To vile imposture makes us dupes and fools."

So widespread and importunate were these errors that we find even our own College gravely testing men in their knowledge of astrology (1593-96), deputing members of our body to inspect bewitched people, and, summoning those who assumed the power of cure by touch, requiring them to exercise their skill in the presence of the College.

It is not to be forgotten that Harvey himself, following on the lines of Galen and Aristotle, adopted a view as to the nature of life which is a phase of the almost universal conception held in one form or another up to our own day. It appeared as the animism' of Hoffmann and Stahl, who bequeathed to us as a consequence what is known as expectant medicine.' Another development of the same idea is the theory of a vital principle, the 'vitalism of Haller and Barthez, from which even now we cannot be said to be entirely free.

Scarcely more than a century ago the medical world was divided by the contending schools of Cullen and Brown: the latter with his sthenic and asthenic diseases and tonic and depressant treatment; the former, in hot hostility, advocating the hypothesis that disease was the result of opposite conditions of spasm and debility. Soon after this appeared in France the doctrine of Broussais, who held that gastro-enteritis is the basis of pathology, and local depletion the proper remedy for fever. There is yet another