Up to this point in his article Wunderlich says nothing to which any of my readers are likely to object. Quite the contrary; the first impression which the text makes is something like this: At last Wunderlich has discovered a road by following which closely one may eventually develop a really scientific practical medicine. But, when one reaches the end of the article, one can scarcely fail to experience no small degree of disappointment on finding that it does not furnish the slightest evidence of the manner in which the author’s seemingly admirable scheme is to be realized; nor—as we are assured by Petersen—is any further enlightenment upon this subject to be found in any of the succeeding volumes, either in the seven which were published under the joint editorship of Wunderlich and Roser, or in those which were issued after Wilhelm Griesinger had been accepted as an associate in the management of the Archiv. The old evil which carried Broussais as it were by storm into the dictatorship of medical thinking and of medical practice in France was here being reëstablished in Germany. Men seemed to find it impossible to go on patiently collecting facts; they could not resist the temptation to build theories first. So far at least as the treatment of disease is concerned, we are forced to admit that the collecting of any large body of facts is well-nigh an impossibility. Only after the lapse of very many years would it be possible to realize the desirable results which Wunderlich had in mind.
BOOK III
THE VIENNA SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
CHAPTER VIII
GERHARD VAN SWIETEN
(1700–1772)
A short time before his death the Hollander, Gerhard van Swieten, who was one of the last physicians of European celebrity to give up the habit of conversing in Latin with his professional brethren, made the following remark, in a letter which he wrote to one of his friends in the Medical Faculty of Halle: “Praxis medica quotidie me convincit quot et quanta sint quae ignoro.” (In my medical practice I realize more and more clearly every day how many and how important are the things concerning which I am ignorant.) This epigrammatic remark, which throws such a flood of light upon the character of van Swieten, may appropriately be placed at the head of the following brief biographical sketch of this distinguished founder of the Vienna School of Medicine.