The Debt to Research in Medicine.
Investigators are never so useful as when thoroughly disinterested; let them find what they may, it will either have worth in itself or lead to something which has. Dr. Pye-Smith says:—
“Facts have been found at every step of science which were valueless at their discovery, but which, little by little, fell into line and led to applications of the highest importance—the observation of the tarnishing of silver, the twitching of the frog’s leg, were the origin of photography and telegraphy; the abstract problem of spontaneous generation gave rise to the antiseptics of surgery. . . . In medicine, as in every other practical art, progress depends upon knowledge, and knowledge must be pursued for its own sake without continually looking about for its practical applications. Harvey’s great discovery of the circulation of the blood was a strictly physiological discovery, and had little influence upon the healing art until the invention of auscultation. So, also, Dubois Reymond’s investigation of the electrical properties of muscle and nerve was purely scientific, but we use the results thus obtained every day in the diagnosis of disease, in its successful treatment, and in the scarcely less important demonstration of the falsehoods by which the name of electricity is used for purposes of gain. The experiments on blood pressure, begun by Hales, and carried to a successful issue in our own time by Ludwig, have already led to knowledge which we use every day by the bedside, and which only needs the discovery of a better method of measuring blood pressure during life to become one of our foremost and most practical aids in treatment. Again, we can most of us remember using very imperfect physiological knowledge to fix, more or less successfully, the locality of an organic lesion of the brain. I also remember such attempts being described as a mere scientific game, which could only be won after the player was beaten, since when the accuracy of diagnosis was established, its object was already lost; but who would say this now, when purely physiological research and purely diagnostic success have led to one of the most brilliant achievements of practical medicine, the operative treatment of organic diseases of the brain?”
The prevention of disease, as important as its cure, owes an incalculable debt to Louis Pasteur. De Varigny says in “Experimental Evolution”:—
“Pasteur, about 1850, spent a long time in seemingly very speculative and very idle studies of dissymmetry and symmetry in various crystals, especially those of tartaric acid; the practical value of such investigations seemed to be naught, and at all events it had no interest save for the elucidation of some points in crystallography. But this investigation led logically to the study of fermentation, and the final outcome of Pasteur’s work has been—leaving out the stepping stones—the discovery of the real cause of a large number of diseases, the cure of one of them, and the expectation, based on facts, that all these diseases can be defeated by appropriate methods.”
What is true in medicine is equally true in physics. Concerning the debt of the inventor to the man of physical research, Mr. Addison Browne has this to say:—
Research in Physics and Chemistry.
“A few weeks ago I was talking with an electrician who has made several very interesting and important inventions. I asked him of how much importance he conceived that the scientific men of the closet, the original investigators, so-called, had been in working out the great inventions of electricity during the last fifty years—telegraphs, cables, telephones, electric lighting, electric motors; and whether these achievements were not in reality due mainly to practical men, the inventors who knew what they were after, rather than to the men of science who rarely applied their work to practical use. He said, ‘The scientific men are of the utmost importance; everything that has been done has proceeded upon the basis of what they have previously discovered, and upon the principles and laws which they have laid down. Nowadays we never work at random—I go to my laboratory, study the application of the principles, facts and laws which the great scientists like Faraday, Thomson and Maxwell have worked out, and endeavor to find such devices as shall secure my aim.’ As Tyndall said, ‘Behind all our practical applications there is a region of intellectual action to which practical men have rarely contributed, but from which they draw all their supplies. Cut them off from that region and they become eventually helpless.’”
Research is golden only when brought to fruit by co-operation. To quote Professor Tyndall:—
“To keep science in healthy play three classes of workers are necessary: (1) The investigators of natural truth, whose vocation it is to pursue that truth, and extent the field of discovery for its own sake, without reference to practical ends. (2) The teachers who diffuse this knowledge. (3) The appliers of these principles and truths to make them available to the needs, the comforts, or the luxuries, of life. These three classes ought to co-exist and interact.”