Makers of Modern Medicine

by James J. Walsh

Germany has come to occupy so large a place in progressive medicine during the last half-century that it is rather hard to conceive of a time when the Teutonic race was not the head and front of modern medical progress. The leadership that had existed in Italy for over five centuries only passed to Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first great leader in German medical thought was Johann Müller, and to the wonderful group of students that gathered around him German medicine owes the initiative which gradually forced it into the prominent place it still holds in the world of medicine. The great institutions of learning that have since come in Germany did not exist with anything like their modern systematic arrangement when Müller began his work. It was the marvellous influence of the man as a teacher, and not the scientific aids afforded by institutional methods, that brought forth the great generation of teachers which followed immediately on Müller's footsteps. Nowhere more than in the life of Müller can it be recognized with absolute certainty that the system and the institution count for little in education, as compared to the man and his methods.

The keynote of Müller's career, even more than what he did for biology, and for all the biological sciences related to medicine, is the wonderful conservatism of thought which characterizes his scientific conclusions, while at the same time he began the application of the experimental methods [{218}] to medicine as they had never been applied before. At a time when physiologists, because of Woehler's recent discoveries of the possibility of the artificial manufacture of urea, might easily have been led to the thought that life counted for little in the scheme of the universe, Müller continued to teach consistently that vital energy may direct chemical or physical forces, but must not be confounded with them. It looked as if in the development of the chemistry of the carbon compounds, all of which are the result of life action, that materialistic views must be expected to prevail. Müller insisted, however, that life ever remains the guiding principle which rules and coordinates all the physical and chemical forces at play, within living organisms; and that the vital principle is entirely independent of these forces so closely attached to matter.

All Müller's disciples, and they were the representative biological scientists in Germany during the nineteenth century, followed closely in his footsteps in this matter, and the result was a conservatism of thought in biology in Germany that is the more surprising when we realize how much German philosophers in their systems emphasized the necessity for absolute independence from all previous systems of philosophical speculation. It is so much more interesting, then, to find what was the method of education that made of Johann Müller so conservative a thinker, while not injuring his genius for experimental observations. The influences that were at work in his earlier years were evidently those that made him subsequently the bulwark against materialistic tendencies in biology, and yet did not impair his originality. His early education was obtained under influences that are usually considered to be distinctly harmful to independence of thought, and yet they seemed to have helped him to the fulfilment of his destiny, as a great thinker and investigator. [{219}] Müller is undoubtedly one of the very great men of modern science, and is the recognized founder of the system and methods of investigation which have given German medicine its present prominence and prestige.

In recent years there have been many tributes to Müller, because as Virchow's teacher it was considered that some of the praise for the work done by Virchow must naturally reflect on the man to whom the great German pathologist acknowledged that he owed so much of his inspiration and his training in methods of investigation. Virchow's death too very naturally led to the recall of what had been accomplished in German medicine during the nineteenth century, and for much of this Johann Müller must be considered as at least indirectly responsible, since to him so many of the great German medical scientists owed their early training. These men, all of them, did not hesitate to attribute the progress of German medicine to the methods introduced by Müller. At the beginning of the twentieth century something of the estimation in which he was held in a land far distant from the German Fatherland may be gathered from the following tribute paid to him in a recent meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York by Dr. C. A. L. Read, of Cincinnati, former President of the American Medical Association. In the midst of his panegyric of Virchow Dr. Read described in some detail the medical faculty of Berlin at the time when Virchow was beginning his work as a student at that University. He said:

"In the faculty there were Dieffenbach, the foremost surgeon of his day; Schoenlein, the great physician who had come from Zurich the same year to join, not only the teaching body, but to act as a reporting counsellor for the ministry and to serve as physician-in-ordinary to the King; Froriep, who was in charge of the Pathological Institute; Caspar, who [{220}] was also medical counsellor, with a seat in the special deputation for medical affairs in the ministry; but towering above them all was the intellectual figure of Johann Müller, the Professor of Physiology. He was an original genius with daring, actually engaged in winnowing the wheat of demonstrated truth from the prevailing chaff of egoistic opinion which divorced physical science from speculative philosophy. Prompted by the inspiration which he had derived in turn from Bichat and the French school, the Professor of Physiology was busily retesting in the laboratory truths previously elaborated by Haller, Whytt, Spalanzani, Cullen, Prochaska, John Hunter, the Bells, Magendie, Berzelius and Bichat himself."

This is the tribute to Johann Müller, nearly fifty years after his death. That of Virchow, at his obsequies in Berlin, is even more enthusiastic. Virchow, then at the age of thirty-seven, at the height of his powers, already acknowledged the greatest of living pathologists, just recalled to Berlin to become Professor of Pathology in the University which he had left more or less in disgrace because of his political opinions, could not say too much of the teacher whom he respected and honored so highly and whose inspiration he felt stood for so much in his own career.

He said:

"My feeble powers have been invoked to honor this great man whom we all, representatives of the great medical family, teachers and taught, practitioners and investigators, mutually lament and whose memory is still so vividly with us. Neither cares by day nor labors by night can efface from our mind the sorrow which we feel for his loss. If the will made the deed, how gladly would I attempt the hopeless task of proper appreciation. Few have been privileged, like myself, to have this great master beside them in every stage of development. It was his hand which guided [{221}] my first steps as a medical student. His words proclaimed my doctorate and from that spot, whence now his cold image looks down upon us, his kindly eyes beamed warmly upon me, as I delivered my first public lecture as Privat-Docent under his deanship. And, in after years, I was the one out of the large number of his pupils who, by his own choice, was selected to sit beside him within the narrow circle of the faculty.
"But how can one tongue adequately praise a man who presided over the whole domain of the science of natural life; or how can one tongue depict the master mind, which extended the limits of his great kingdom until it became too large for his own undivided government? Is it possible in a few short minutes to sketch the history of a conqueror who, in restless campaigns, through more than one generation, only made use of each new victory as a standpoint whereon he might set his feet and boldly look out for fresh triumphs?
"Yet such is the task to which we are called. We have to inquire what it was that raised Müller to so high a place in the estimation of his contemporaries; by what magic it was that envy became dumb before him, and by what mysterious means he contrived to enchain to himself the hearts of beginners and to keep them captive through many long years? Some have said--and not without reason--that there was something supernatural about Müller, that his whole appearance bore the stamp of the uncommon. That this commanding influence did not wholly depend on his extraordinary original endowments is certain, from what we know of the history of his mental greatness."

Virchow's tribute could not well be more enthusiastic or more ample. His appreciation has been the standard for all other medical opinions of the man. How much Müller is honored at the present time in Germany can be best [{222}] appreciated from the number of times that his name is mentioned with respect and often with laudation in the proceedings of German medical societies. Scarcely a meeting passes in which more than once Johann Müller is not referred to as the founder of the scientific method in medicine which has given Germany her present position in the very forefront of medical scientific progress. It is a common expression, said half in jest it is true, but surely more than half in earnest, that the proceedings of no medical society would be really successful within the bounds of the German fatherland unless they were hallowed by an invocation of the great name of Johann Müller, the revered patron of modern German medicine. This is no witticism by exaggeration, after the American fashion, but a sincere Teutonic expression of feeling that occupies German medical minds with regard to the man who founded the most progressive school of modern medicine, and in doing so brought honor to his native country.

Johann Müller was born at Coblentz, on July 14, 1801. About six months before, the Emperor of Austria by the treaty of Luneville, signed February 9, 1801, ceded to the French Republic all the Austrian possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. The electors of Treves, who were archbishops and reigning princes and who had resided for centuries at Coblentz, by this treaty disappeared forever from the list of German rulers. When Johann Müller was born, French prefects of the Departments of the Rhine and Moselle took up their residence in the old town which had been, since the beginning of the French Revolution, a favorite dwelling place for the French nobility driven from their homes by fear of persecution.