Makers of Modern Medicine. James Joseph Walsh
he is nearly thirty, it is easy to understand that perhaps the precious years in which originality might manifest itself are already past before he gets out of the swaddling clothes of enforced instruction from others. As has been very well said, it is possible to smother whatever of the investigating spirit and original initiative there may be in a young man by attempting to teach him too much of what the present generation knows. Unfortunately, it happens only too often even in this wise generation of ours that it is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them ridiculous as the knowing so many things that are not so. The number of things that the young man has to learn and that are taught him, often with the assurance that they are almost gospel truth in medicine, and yet that he finds before he has been long out of school or indeed sometimes before he leaves school, to be at best opinions, is entirely too great. The saving grace for the correction of this constantly recurring fault in education is undoubtedly a knowledge of the development of medicine in the past and a recognition of the fact that the accepted truth of any one generation proves after all often enough to be only apparent.
After the false impression that it is to older men we owe progress in medicine, perhaps the most universally accepted apparent truth is that the investigating spirit is communicable, and that the pupils of a great master may be expected to carry on his work and add almost as much as he has done to the great body of medical knowledge during the generation immediately following his work. It would naturally be expected, for instance, that Morgagni having laid the foundations of modern pathology and connected pathological observation with clinical observation the great development in modern diagnosis would have come down in Italy. This was not true, however. The next great step connecting bedside observations with postmortem appearances was made by Auenbrugger in Vienna in distant Austria. Auenbrugger's work having been successfully accomplished it might reasonably be supposed that he himself or some of those who had seen his successful diagnosis of thoracic conditions by percussion would take the next step and discover auscultation. This, however, did not happen in Germany, but in France. It is true that Laennec's work was done under the influence of Corvisart, who revived Auenbrugger's work and gave it to the world once more, and that in a way, therefore, Laennec may be considered an indirect pupil of Auenbrugger; but the fact stands that the two discoveries of percussion and auscultation were made at an interval of nearly fifty years and at a distance of more than a thousand miles from each other.
On the other hand, Laennec having solved the wonderful mystery of the significance of the sounds within the chest as far as they concern pulmonary diseases might have been expected to do as much also for heart disease. Even genius, however, is able it seems to take only one step into the unknown. Auenbrugger did not discover auscultation, though it apparently lay so near at hand. Laennec did not solve the riddle of heart murmurs, though for most of us they do not present any more difficulty than the wonderfully successful recognition of the significance of râles of various kinds in which Laennec never failed. The problem of heart diagnosis was to be solved by Corrigan and the Irish school of medicine hundreds of miles away, though they were doing their work about the same time that Laennec was making his observations in Paris. Curiously enough just during the same decade Richard Bright, in England, was studying out the problem of kidney disease, and, as a young man, teaching the world nearly as much about it as it has ever learned, though, in the seventy-five years that have passed since, so much of investigation has been devoted to the subject.
No one nation can claim the palm of superiority in the matter of original investigation. The spirit of genius breathes where it will, and unfortunately it is incommunicable. Students may think they absorb all that the master has to give them, and that they are ready to go on with his work where he left it. They do actually seem to their own generation to make distinct progress in medicine. When the situation is analyzed fifty or a hundred years afterward, however, it is found that only the master's work counts, and that much of what seems to be advance was only a skirmishing here and there along the lines laid down by him, but without any material progress for true science.
This same peculiarity is manifest, also, not only in the history of sciences allied to medicine, but in that of all the physical sciences. A very striking example is to be found in the story of the rise of electrical science, which took place almost at the same period as that which saw the rise of clinical medicine. Origins in electricity date from Franklin's work here in America and Galvani and Volta's observations in Italy. It might quite naturally have been expected that the further progress of electrical science would come in either of these countries. The next great discoveries, however, were separated by long distances and a considerable interval of time. After Volta came the demonstration by Oersted, in Denmark, of the identity of magnetism with electricity. It was not in Denmark, however, that the problems connected with this principle were worked out, but by Ampere in France. In the mean time, Cavendish and Faraday, working quite independently of their Continental colleagues, were making significant strides in electricity in England.
When the problem of the resistance to the passage of electricity in a conductor was to be studied, another nation supplied the man for the opportunity. Ohm had never been in contact with any of these great contemporaries and did his work entirely by himself. It is a curious confirmation of what we have stated with regard to the young man in medicine and the making of great discoveries that practically all these founders in electricity were under thirty-five when their best original work was accomplished.
From a series of biographies of great medical discoverers, certain salient traits stand out so as to attract attention even from the cursory reader. The essence of significant work in medicine consists of observation, not theory. It has always been the custom to theorize much and unfortunately to observe but little. Long ago John Ruskin said that the hardest thing in the world for a man to do is to see something and to tell it simply as he saw it. Certainly this has been true in medicine. The men who have had eyes, and have used them, have impressed their names upon the history of progressive scientific advance. The theorists have never contributed anything worth while to the body of medical truth.
While this is readily acknowledged by every generation, with regard to the past, it is curious to note how different is the appreciation of each generation for the theorist as opposed to the observer. Medical theorists have always been honored by their contemporaries unless their theories were utterly outlandish, and even then they have had many disciples, and have seldom been without honor and never, with sorrow for the foolishness of men be it said, without emolument. The observer, however, has but rarely been in favor with his contemporaries. Not infrequently the observation that he made appeared to be so obvious that his fellows could not think that it represented a great truth. As a consequence they have usually derided him for attempting to make them see a significance in his observation that they could not think was there. Huxley once stated the phases through which a new scientific truth ordinarily passes. At first it is said to be trivial and insignificant, then as it attracts more attention it is declared to be in contradiction with hitherto known truth. Finally it is declared to be after all only in other terms what the world has always believed in the matter. Certainly through these stages all the great discoveries in medicine have gone. So true is this, that if what seems to be a new truth in medicine is accepted at once, and willingly, there is more than a suspicion that it is not really a new discovery but only a modification of something hitherto well known.
All the great discoverers in medicine have practically without exception met, if not with opposition, surely with neglect of their work. We smile complacently now at the generation that considered the stethoscope a toy, and asked derisively if they should be expected to carry it about with them. The next generation, however, having grown accustomed to the stethoscope, refused quite as inconsequentially to have anything to do with the thermometer. They refused to carry these glass things around with them in order to test the fever that patients might have, since they claimed they were able to accomplish this purpose quite as well by means of their educated touch. The generation of medical men is not yet passed who refused to credit the thought that the diagnosis of diphtheria would ever be made only by the microscope and culture methods, and who considered that they could tell very well what was diphtheria, and what not, from the appearance of the throat.
Of course similar opposition was the fate meted out to every distinguished scientific discoverer, and so I suppose medical men cannot complain. His contemporaries said of Galvani that he had made of himself a dancing master for frogs, because he continued