The Cleveland Medical Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1886

Transcriber's Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
BY JOHN BENNITT, M. D.,
Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine in the Medical Department of the Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
It may not be inappropriate to give in your journal a brief sketch of the history of medicine, by the consideration of which we may come to a better appreciation of our present standpoint as medical men. We may also the better understand how much we, as medical men, and the world at large, are indebted to the methodical, plodding workers of the past in the field of inquiry pertaining to the nature and cure of disease. Such review may have the effect of stimulating medical men to more careful observation and the recording the results of observations that they may be given to others for mutual benefit.
Science may be defined as “classified knowledge.” But all our knowledge is based on experience and observation. Medical science, like other sciences, taking the definition of Sir John Herschel, is “the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged so as to become attainable by one.”
In all cases art and observation precede and beget science, and give origin to its gradual construction. But soon science, so built up, begins to reflect new light upon its parents—observation and art—helps them onward, expands the range of vision, corrects their errors, improves their methods and suggests new ones. The stars were mapped out and counted by the shepherds watching their flocks by night, long before astronomy assumed any scientific form.
From the earliest ages the pains and disorders of the human body must have arrested men's anxious attention and claimed their succor. The facts observed, both as to hurts and diseases, and as to their attempted remedying, were handed down by tradition or by record from generation to generation in continually increasing abundance, and out of the repeated survey and comparison of these has grown the recognition of certain laws of events and rules of action, which together constitute “medical science.”