or France. I doubt whether that is a good or a
wise condition of things. I do not think it is
a condition of things which can exist for any great
length of time, now that people are every day becoming
more and more awake to the importance of scientific
investigation and to the astounding and unexpected
manner in which it everywhere reacts upon practical
pursuits. I should look upon the establishment
of some institution of that kind as a recognition on
the part of the medical profession in general, that
if their great and beneficent work is to be carried
on, they must, like other people who have great and
beneficent work to do, contribute to the advancement
of knowledge in the only way in which experience shows
that it can be advanced.
* * * *
*
Footnotes:
[1]The fees to be paid by candidates for admission
to the examinations of the Divisional Board should
be of such an amount as will be sufficient to cover
the cost of the examinations and the other expenses
of the Divisional Board, and also to provide the
sum required to compensate the medical authorities,
or such of them as may be entitled to compensation,
for any pecuniary losses they may hereafter sustain
by reason of the abolition of their privilege of conferring
a licence to practise. Report 50, p. xii.
THE CONNECTION OF THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES WITH MEDICINE
[1881]
The great body of theoretical and practical knowledge
which has been accumulated by the labours of some
eighty generations, since the dawn of scientific thought
in Europe, has no collective English name to which
an objection may not be raised; and I use the term
“medicine” as that which is least likely
to be misunderstood; though, as every one knows, the
name is commonly applied, in a narrower sense, to one
of the chief divisions of the totality of medical
science.
Taken in this broad sense, “medicine”
not merely denotes a kind of knowledge, but it comprehends
the various applications of that knowledge to the
alleviation of the sufferings, the repair of the injuries,
and the conservation of the health, of living beings.
In fact, the practical aspect of medicine so far dominates
over every other, that the “Healing Art”
is one of its most widely-received synonyms.
It is so difficult to think of medicine otherwise than
as something which is necessarily connected with curative
treatment, that we are apt to forget that there must
be, and is, such a thing as a pure science of medicine—a
“pathology” which has no more necessary
subservience to practical ends than has zoology or
botany.
The logical connection between this purely scientific
doctrine of disease, or pathology, and ordinary biology,
is easily traced. Living matter is characterised
by its innate tendency to exhibit a definite series
of the morphological and physiological phenomena which
constitute organisation and life. Given a certain
range of conditions, and these phenomena remain the
same, within narrow limits, for each kind of living
thing. They furnish the normal and typical character
of the species, and, as such, they are the subject-matter
of ordinary biology.
