There are few houses now without their daguerreotype portraits of some member of the family. This is a portrait copied from the human face by a sunbeam. The name daguerreotype is derived from the Frenchman Daguerre, who announced his discovery at the time when our countryman, Mr. Fox Talbot, was engaged in working out the same wonderful problem. We notice this branch of recent invention merely to point out how science and art call forth mechanical labour. When every house has its little portrait, there will naturally be a great demand for frames. The manufacture of daguerreotype-frames, both here, and in the United States, has furnished a new field of employment.
Every scientific discovery, such as photography, is a step in advance of preceding discovery. If Newton had not discovered the fundamental properties of light, in the seventeenth century, we should, in all likelihood, have had no photography in the nineteenth. Abstract science is the parent of practical art.
Newton.
It has been said by an American writer, who has published several treatises well-calculated to give the workman an elevated idea of his rights and duties, that the "man who will go into a cotton-mill,—who will observe the parts of the machinery, and the various processes of the fabric, till he reaches the hydraulic press, with which it is made into a bale, and the canal or railroad by which it is sent to market, may find every branch of trade, and every department of science, literally crossed, intertwined, interwoven with every other, like the woof and the warp of the article manufactured."[27] This crossing and intertwining of the abstract and practical sciences, the mechanic skill and the manual labour, which are so striking in the manufacture of a piece of calico, prevail throughout every department of industry in a highly-civilized community. Every one who labours at all profitably labours for the production of utility, and sets in motion the labour of others. Look at the labour of the medical profession. In the fourteenth century, John de Gaddesden treated a son of Edward II. for the small-pox by wrapping him up in scarlet cloth, and hanging scarlet curtains round his bed; and, as a remedy for epilepsy, the same physician carried his patients to church to hear mass. The medical art was so little understood in those days, that the professors of medicine had made no impression upon the understanding of the people; and they consequently trusted not to medicine, but to vain charms, which superstitions the ignorance of the practitioners themselves kept alive. The surgical practitioners of Europe, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, put their unhappy patients to the most dreadful torture by their mode of treating wounds and broken limbs. When they amputated a leg or an arm they applied the actual cautery, or red-hot iron, to stop the effusion of blood. Ambrose Paré, one of the most eminent of the French surgeons of that period, who accompanied the army to the siege of Turin, in 1536, thus describes the mode in which he found his surgical brethren dealing with gun-shot wounds:
Ambrose Paré.
"I was then very raw and inexperienced, having never seen the treatment of gun-shot wounds. It is true that I had read in the Treatise of Jean de Vigo on wounds in general, that those inflicted by fire-arms partake of a poisonous nature on account of the powder, and that they should be treated with hot oil of elder, mixed with a little theriacum. Seeing, therefore, that such an application must needs put the patient to extreme pain, to assure myself before I should make use of this boiling oil, I desired to see how it was employed by the other surgeons. I found their method was to apply it at the first dressing, as hot as possible, within the wound, with tents and setons; and this I made bold to do likewise. At length my oil failed me, and I was fain to substitute a digestive, made of the yolk of eggs, rose-oil, and turpentine. At night I could not rest in my bed in peace, fearing that I should find the wounded, in whose cases I had been compelled to abstain from using this cautery, dead of poison: this apprehension made me rise very early in the morning to visit them; but beyond all my hopes, I found those to whom I had applied the digestive, suffering little pain, and their wounds free from inflammation; and they had been refreshed by sleep in the night. On the contrary, I found those to whom the aforesaid oil had been applied, feverish, in great pain; and with swelling and inflammation round their wounds. I resolved, therefore, that I would never burn unfortunate sufferers from gun-shot in that cruel manner again." Francis I., king of France, having a persuasion that, because the Jews were the most skilful physicians of that day, the virtue was in the Jew, and not in the science which he professed, sent to Charles V. of Spain for a Jewish physician; but finding that the man who arrived had been converted to Christianity, he refused to employ him, thinking the virtue of healing had therefore departed from him. A statute of Henry VIII. says, "For as much as the science and cunning of physic and surgery is daily within this realm exercised by a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning: some, also, con no letters on the book, so far forth, that common artificers, as smiths, and weavers, and women, boldly and accustomably, take upon them great cures, in which they partly use sorcery and witchcraft, partly apply such medicines to the disease as be very noxious, and nothing meet, to the high displeasure of God, great infamy to the faculty, and the grievous damage and destruction of diverse of the king's people." When such ignorance prevailed, diseases of the slightest kind must have been very often fatal; and the power of all men to labour profitably must have been greatly diminished by the ravages of sickness. These ravages are now checked by medical science and medical labour.