A typical example of the sort of opposition which a modern discoverer in science meets with is to be found in the life of Ohm, after whom, because of his discovery of the law of electrical resistance, the unit of resistance is called. When he made his discovery Ohm was working in the Gymnasium at Cologne. The leading physicists of the day could not bring themselves to believe that this comparatively young man--he was scarcely forty at the time--could have made a discovery that went far beyond their knowledge. His paper on the subject was discussed rather coldly and without any recognition of the far-reaching significance of the work that he had accomplished. A distinguished representative of the University of Berlin criticised it severely. As the law was advanced on mathematical as well as experimental grounds, the opinion of the university authorities at Berlin was looked upon as extremely important, since at the time mathematics was the forte there. The minister of education took his cue from the authorities at Berlin. Ohm and his friends urged his appointment to a university position. This was not only refused, but was rejected in such terms that Ohm offered his resignation as a teacher. His resignation was accepted with regrets by the ministry, but with a distinct expression that Ohm must not expect other than a gymnasium position. The consequence of this misunderstanding was that other teaching institutions in Germany would not give him a place on their staff, because of the danger of misunderstanding with the ministry of education. Ohm had to accept a private tutorship in mathematics in Berlin and a few hours of teaching in a military school, for which he was paid three hundred thalers a year. This would be something over $200 in our money, though money was worth, in buying power, probably two or three times as much as it is at the present time. Six precious years of Ohm's life, at the very acme of his powers as an investigator, were thus spent away from the larger educational institutions and their opportunities for research, because men would not accept the great discovery that he had made, and could not be brought to understand that a genius might come along to revolutionize all their thinking, though he did his work from an obscure position, and practically attracted no attention [{409}] before he found this wonderful clue to the maze of electrical science, which meant so much for the elucidation of difficulties hitherto insoluble.
Always men find some excuse other than their own unwillingness to confess that they were wrong. It is to this that they object, and not the acceptance of the new truth. In the course of writing the biographies of the Makers of Modern Medicine, published last year, and the Makers of Electricity, which is now preparing for the press, one fact proved to be very striking. It is that discoverers of really great truths are practically always what we would call young men, and what older men are apt to think of as scarcely more than mere boys. Such men as Morgagni, the Father of Pathology; Laennec, the Father of Pulmonary Diagnosis; Stokes, who taught us so much about the lungs; and Corrigan, who laid the foundation of exact knowledge in heart diseases,--were under twenty-five when they made their primal discovery, and some of them scarcely more than twenty. Vesalius published his great work on anatomy when he was not yet thirty, and Stensen did his best work under twenty-five. When such men attempt to teach their elders, of course they are properly put in their places by their elders, and this often includes a good deal of bitter satire and discouragement. It is the eternal conflict between youth and age that constitutes the main reason for opposition to progress in any form of knowledge, for youth will be progressive and age will be conservative. Unfortunately age often dissembles the reasons for its opposition even to itself, and religion and common sense and supposedly established principles of science are all appealed to as contradicted by the new doctrine introduced by young men, the truth of which their elders cannot see.
Nor must it be thought that the second half of the nineteenth century was free from this tendency to persecute those who made advances in medicine. There is probably no form of treatment which, in the minds of those who know most about the disease, that has done more to save awful suffering in mankind than the Pasteur treatment for rabies. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the introduction of that treatment will not be likely to forget how much of pain [{410}] and suffering the discovery and introduction of it cost its author. Nothing too bitter could be said by the medical profession of Germany for many years after the treatment was first broached. One of the most distinguished of German medical discoverers in the nineteenth century said, in a very climax of satire, "that the distinguished Frenchman deserved to be well known as one who treated diseases of which he knew nothing by remedies of which he knew less." His good faith was impugned, his statistics scorned, his results laughed at, even his friends hesitated to say anything on the subject. Those who were close to Pasteur know that he suffered, for his nature was of the most sensitive, veritable torment because of this bitter opposition, which at one time, because his French colleagues also were sceptical of his treatment, threatened to impair the usefulness of our greatest discoverer in nineteenth century medicine and leave him without that support which would enable him to go on with his precious investigation.
The more recent furore against antitoxin is still in many persons' minds. Physicians who used it, and in whose cases serious results took place, not the consequence of the antitoxin, but the consequence of factors of the disease over which they had no control, sometimes suffered seriously in their practice. All forms of opposition were aroused against it. Even at the present time one still hears of the crime, as some do not hesitate to call it, of injecting the serum of a diseased animal into the veins of the human being, and above all a little child. There are men (intelligent men!) who do not stop short of tracing all sorts of disease incidents that happen after such an injection, even many years later, to the evil effects of the horse serum employed. Such people are exercising that superstitious fanatic faculty which at all times has caused the obstinately conservative to seek and find the most serious objections to any new doctrine, careless of the consequences that they might bring on the discoverer or the benefit they might prevent for the mass of humanity.
Originally vaccination was opposed by certain clergymen on the grounds of theological objection to its use. At the present time most of such objection has ceased, [{411}] It is still clergymen, however, who are the most prominent among the anti-vaccinationists, though now they usually find biological and pathological, instead of theological reasons. They proclaim it a crime against nature, from the biological standpoint, that the disease of an animal should be conveyed to man, even for protective purposes. At the present time one can find just as bitter objections to vaccination in anti-vaccination journals as when the subject was first brought under discussion. Men must find some reason for their opposition, and they take the weapon that is handiest and that they are able to use with best effect. In an era when theological ideas were dominant, theology was ready at hand for this purpose, but any other ology will do just as well, and the history of science, even in the present day, will show that always some ology, regardless of human feelings, is used quite as ruthlessly and as cruelly as in the olden days. There are tortures of spirit that are worse than prison or even fire.
When we recall how few examples there are of opposition to science on the part of ecclesiastics, and how most of these prove on careful examination to be due to misunderstandings rather than to actual desire to prevent the development of science, the stories of the way in which discoveries in science were received in more modern times become a striking lesson that makes us appreciate the broad-mindedness and liberal policy of ecclesiastical educators in the olden time. They were evidently much more ready to accept novel ideas, and much less prone to set themselves up in opposition to them, than the educational authorities of more modern times. This is the phase of the history of education in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that deserves the most careful study, and that should make modern educators feel proud of their kinship with these old founders and patrons in education, who at the same time furnish an example of liberality of mind that it would be very beneficial to have in our modern supposedly free universities.
For while we are prone to be proud of our academic freedom, we have had more than one example in recent times of how dangerous it is for a man, even though he may be recognized as an authority in his department, [{412}] to treat certain economic questions from a standpoint that is not favored by the rest of the faculty, or by the Board of Governors, or, above all, by certain munificent patrons of the particular educational institution. Much has been said about religious educational institutions, about the middle of the nineteenth century, so hampering the work of men in the physical sciences, especially with regard to problems in geology and evolution, as to nullify progress. Just this same thing, however, is true with regard to many economic questions, because of the attitude of educational interests with regard to free trade and protection, single tax, and socialism and the like. No professor of science at a religious institution ever felt himself more in the grip of old-fashioned notions than do certain professors in departments of finance and sociology with regard to problems that are now of the most profound interest. Men have changed the reason for their conservatism, but the conservatism itself remains, and apparently always will remain. This is what must be realized when the stories of ecclesiastical opposition to progress are told.