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/23

 15 system which cannot be passed over without reference, viz., Homocopathy, which teaches that disease consists of symptoms which are to be treated by remedial agents pro- ducing like symptoms in the healthy, the potency of the medicaments increasing in proportion to their dilution.

The influence which these myths have had upon the healing art has been most varied. But certainly they have played a large part in occasioning the low regard in which practitioners of medicine have too often been held by the public. I cannot do better perhaps than quote the words of Dr. Percival, who said: A list of all the follies which at different periods have been established as articles of faith in medicine would form the severest satire on the healing art.'

But despite all these untoward influences, the progress, as I have reminded you, was sound so far as it went when we consider the disadvantages under which the workers pursued their investigations. Nevertheless, they came to a line, beyond which they made but slight advance- a line indistinct, perhaps, and not equally sharp and well- defined in every subject, but withal a line across which, without the intervention of some great change, they could never have passed. We may apply to this period the words that Bacon used in reference to science in general in a previous age: 'Learning,' he wrote, 'is neither prosperous nor greatly advanced, and a way must be opened to the human understanding entirely distinct from that known to our predecessors, and different aids procured that the mind may exercise her power over the nature of things.'

Looking back as I can to the manner in which the component parts of the medical curriculum were pursued when I began my student life, and contrasting this manner with what goes on around me now, I cannot doubt, in the words of Bacon, that a new way has been opened-an in- stauratio magna. When I tell some of my younger listeners that only forty-six years ago my teacher and friend, the