It is a remarkable and at the same time a terrible and most lamentable fact, that the practice of medicine—an art of daily necessity and application, most nearly affecting the dearest interests and well being of mankind, and to the improvement of which we are encouraged and impelled by the strongest motives of interest and humanity, of love for our neighbor and emulous zeal for professional skill and superiority therein—should, after a probation of so long a period, and recorded experience of at least two thousand years, still remain, as it confessedly does in most respects, so little understood and generally of such doubtful and uncertain application.
The present age, unlike any that has preceded it, is peculiarly one of rigid, radical and fundamental examination. Everything in the Heavens above, or in the Earth beneath, is tested and retested; analyzed, synthetized and submitted to the crucible of stern reason, and the logical conclusion of experience; even to the extreme of possibility. This is true not only of the material universe, but of all mental and moral conditions, of social, political and even religious institutions. Nothing, in this day, and especially in this country of free thought and liberty of speech, is taken for granted merely because it can lay claim to the honors of a great antiquity, or can number thousands or millions of adherents. Vast differences are to be observed in governments, churches, creeds and social practices; and all, however opposite and apparently antagonistic, are working out a solution to the problem—
"What is Truth?"
Conservatism is fast dying out, hidden and smothered by the ever-flowing tidal-waves of progression. Radicalism ceases to become radical, by the daily and hourly recurrence of startling discoveries, and new, unheard-of, and unexpected adaptations of old laws. The mistakes of to-day will be found to be mistakes, and will be rectified. Whenever and wherever freedom holds her sway, evil must work out its own destruction, and good enthrone itself in the hearts of those benefitted by its benign influence. In this spirit, and with such views, let us look at the progress of Medical Science that we may learn from the experience of the past to correctly estimate the developments of the present and aid wisely in the working for a more glorious future.
Medicine has been—not inaptly styled—"The daughter of dreams." From the time of Hippocrates until now, the great body of the profession has been swayed by conflicting theories, founded upon either the wholly unsupported fancies and conjectures of their authors, or unwarrantably built upon isolated facts, often accidental in their occurence, partial in their observation, and improperly understood in their inherent nature and theoretical significance, pointing to a law of action widely different from the one in support of which they had been adduced. All branches of medicine have been involved in these crude absurdities; nor has the nomenclature of any department of science, even in our day, been entirely purged from the errors and misleadings with which the past so fruitfully abounds.
To mark the improvement and advancement in the various branches of medical science; to compare the present with the past; to observe the unfolding growth, maturity, and decay of medical creeds; to discern the power of those master-minds, that, far beyond the ages in which they lived fore-shadowed the forth-coming discoveries that were to make other men immortal; to sigh over the incredulity of whole races, whose blind and dogmatical adherence to the theories of some prominent physiologist or anatomist—was at once silenced by the light of a new truth, suddenly and clearly promulgated by a single mind. To do all these things, was the labor of a whole life; volumes could be written in such investigation, and still thousands of facts be left untouched and forgotten, forever buried in the chaos of medical creeds, medical truths and medical fictions.
Old Physic has for several centuries past drifted in the wrong direction, striking occasionally upon a rock, but finds itself to day further off from shore than ever before.
Medicine, the oldest and most important of all branches of science, has not kept up with developments in other departments, but the rays of light have already deeply penetrated into the darkness of the past, fast undermining the building of the so-called "Rational Medicine" with all its hypothesis and traditions.