I am
in little danger of underrating Anatomy or Physiology; but as each of
these branches splits up into specialties, any one of which may take up a
scientific life-time, I would have them taught with a certain judgment
and reserve, so that they shall not crowd the more immediately practical
branches. So of all the other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of
knowledge, I would have them strictly subordinated to that particular
kind of knowledge for which the community looks to its medical advisers.
A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as
medicine itself is a science. On the natural history side, medicine is a
science; on the curative side, chiefly an art. This is implied in
Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease and
individualize the patient."
The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in
distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we know
about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of sickness.
We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its fruit; we eat
the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its root. Nothing
but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato ball and cook
the tomato. So of most of our remedies. The subchloride of mercury,
calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of mercury,
corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could have told
us it would be so.
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