Makers of Modern Medicine Part 6

"I remember, when discussing with him certain questions touching the conditions of man in this life, and dwelling upon his hopes, his fears, his pains, and his joys, and coming to the conclusions which merely human reason discloses to us; and when dwelling on the deformity of the heart, our blindness, our ignorance, the evils connected with our physical structures, our crimes, our calamities, and our unfathomable capacity both for suffering and for enjoyment; he observed, Mrs. Jenner can explain all these things: they cause no difficulties to her."

Toward the end of his life Jenner's feelings with regard to the importance of a confident other worldliness as the only fitting explanation for the mysteries of this, became emphasized. To quote his biographer once more:

"As he approached nearer to his own end, his conversations with myself were generally more or less tinged with such views as occur to the serious mind when contemplating the handiwork of the Creator.

In all the confusion and disorder which appears in the physical world, and in all the anomalies and errors which deface the moral, he saw convincing demonstration that He who formed all things out of nothing still wields and guides the machinery of his mighty creation."

Jenner's feelings with regard to the relative importance of medical and religious ministrations may be very well appreciated from an expression of his on the occasion when he was being presented to a distinguished n.o.bleman by the famous missionary, Roland Hill. The Reverend Mr. Hill said: "Allow me to present your Lordship my friend, Dr. Jenner, who has been the means of saving more lives than any other man." "Ah," responded Jenner, "were I like {111} you I could save souls." In his sketch of Jenner's life in "The Disciples of AEsculapius," Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson considers that this incident shows a lack of appreciation of the dignity of the medical profession and a humility rather difficult to understand. Anyone who will place himself in Jenner's position of fervent belief that the one thing necessary is the salvation of souls will not fail to recognize, however, his sincerity or fail to appreciate its true significance.

After all, Jenner was so deeply impressed with the importance of other worldly things and the comparative insignificance of this that he found it even a little difficult to understand why men should not see the direct action of the Creator and all His providence in even some of the minutest details of life. Once he said, "I do not marvel that men are grateful to me, but I am surprised that they do not feel grateful to G.o.d for making me a medium of good."

Few men who have accomplished so much have felt so little vainglory over it as Jenner. There was not a jot or t.i.ttle of what is so rightly called conceit in him. He well deserves a place beside such beautiful characters as Morgagni, Auenbrugger, Laennec and Pasteur, whose work was done for others, not for themselves, and after all the most striking definition of a saint is one who thinks first of others and only second of himself.

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GALVANI, FOUNDER OF ANIMAL ELECTRICITY

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The world that I regard is myself; it is the Microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and Fortunes, do err in my Alt.i.tude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not only in respect of the Heaven above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us; that ma.s.s of Flesh that circ.u.mscribes me, limits not my mind; that surface that tells the Heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade me I have any: I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty; though the number of the Arc do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind; whilst I study to find how I am a Microcosm, or little World, I find myself something more than the great one. There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

--Sir Thos. Browne, M.D.

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GALVANI, FOUNDER OF ANIMAL ELECTRICITY.

It is often thought and only too often stated that the impetus to the rise of our modern science which came during the last half of the eighteenth century was due to the spirit of the French Revolution, making itself felt long before the actual declaration of the rights of man, by the French Encyclopedists. It is the custom to conclude that the spirit of liberty which was abroad infected the minds of the rising generation to such an extent that they cast off the fetters of old traditional modes of thinking, refused to accept supposed truths on the strength of tradition or on authority as before, tested knowledge for themselves, and as a consequence made true progress in the sciences. Something doubtless there is in this, and yet a careful investigation of the lives of the men to whom especially the beginnings of the biological sciences are due, will show that not only were they men with the deepest respect for authority, the greatest reverence for old modes of thinking, but also they were typical representatives of the developing influence of methods of education which are sometimes unfortunately deemed to be narrowing in the extreme.

We have already studied the life of Morgagni, the great Father of Modern Pathology, to find that he least of all, in his generation, was affected by any of the liberalizing tendencies that are supposed to have led up to the freedom of the human mind and the consequent successful broadening of human science. We shall see that there were many others who did their work at the end of the eighteenth century of whom this same thing can be said, and no more {116} striking examples of this can be found than the lives of two great Italians, Volta and Galvani, to whom the modern world has paid the tribute of acknowledging them as founders in electricity by taking their names to express important basic distinctions in the science.

It was not in Italy alone, however, that this adhesion of great scientific minds to the old orthodox teachings of Christianity const.i.tuted a notable characteristic of the history of eighteenth century science. Everywhere the same thing was true. Cavendish, Sir Humphrey Davy and Faraday, the great English scientists, to whom so much of progress in electricity and in physics is due, were very similar in this respect to their Italian colleagues. Oersted the Dane belongs in the same category. In France such distinguished names as Lamarck, the great founder of modern biology and the first to broach the theory of evolution; Hauy, the father of crystallography; Laplace, and many others might be mentioned. The lives of the men who were contemporary workers in medicine as sketched in the present volume will show this same thing to be true also in their cases.

A glance at the life of Aloysius Galvani will ill.u.s.trate how little the spirit of the revolution had to do with the rise of electricity and the first discussions of its relations to life. He was born at Bologna, September 9, 1737. A number of his immediate relatives had been distinguished as clergymen. The early years of Galvani's life were spent in a.s.sociation with religious, and as a youth he wished to become a member of a religious order whose special function it was to a.s.sist the dying at their last hour. His father, however, was opposed to his entrance into religion, and so Galvani devoted himself to medicine at the University of Bologna, and at length became a professor of anatomy in his Alma Mater. Professor Galeazzi, who was at the time {117} one of the most distinguished professors in anatomy in Italy, was very much attracted to young Galvani and became his friend and patron in his student days. Galvani became a member of Galeazzi's household, and finally having fallen in love with one of his daughters, won her father's consent to their early marriage. The happiness in life that he thus prepared for himself became one of the often quoted exemplars of domestic felicity in Bologna, where Galvani's life was pa.s.sed.

Medici, in his panegyric of Galvani, which we shall have occasion to quote from more than once, gives a very pretty story of the doctor's wooing and marriage with Lucia Galeazzi, which we prefer to repeat in the naive simplicity with which it is related by the Italian panegyrist.

Galvani had been seriously thinking of matrimony for some time and had, it seems (strange as that might be considered in a rising young scientist in our day), even prayed for counsel in the matter. One of his favorite saints was St. Francis of Sales, the Archbishop of Geneva, the gentleman saint as he has been called, for whose charming personal character Galvani had a very devout admiration. One day while praying in one of the churches of Bologna before a statue of St.

Francis of Sales he looked up after some moments of abstraction to find a young woman's face between him and the altar. The face proved to be that of Lucia. Galvani looked upon it as a sign from heaven of approval of some of his wishes, and applied for the hand of the fair Lucia. Anyone who has seen the offerings at the shrine of St. Anthony of Padua, not so far from Bologna, and has realized that the good patron of things lost seems also to be a special subject of recourse in cases of lost hearts among the northern Italians even at the present day, will realize that probably the story as told is the simple truth without any tincture of romance.

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Galvani began original work of a high order very early in his medical career. His graduation thesis with regard to bones, treating specially their formation and development, attracted no little attention and is especially noteworthy because of the breadth of view in it, for it touches on the various questions relative to bones from the standpoint of physics and chemistry as well as medicine and surgery. It was sufficient to obtain for its author the place of lecturer in anatomy in the University of Bologna, besides the post of director of the teaching of anatomy in the Inst.i.tute of Sciences, a subsidiary inst.i.tution. From the very beginning his course was popular. Galvani was an easy, interesting talker, and he was one of the first who introduced experimental demonstrations into his lectures.

At this time the science of comparative anatomy was just beginning to attract widespread attention. John Hunter in London was doing a great work in this line which has placed him in the front rank of contributors to biology and collectors of important facts in all the sciences allied to anatomy and physiology. Galvani took up this work with enthusiasm and began the study particularly of birds. These animals, the farthest removed from man of the beings that have warm blood, present by that very fact many interesting contrasts and a.n.a.logies, which furnish important suggestions for the explanation of difficult problems in human anatomy and physiology.

His experimental work in comparative anatomy, strange as it might appear and apparently not to be expected, led him into the domain of electricity through the observation of certain phenomena of animal electricity and the effect of electrical current on animals.

Like so many other great discoveries in science, his first and most important observations in electrical phenomena {119} were results of an accident. Of course, it is easy to talk of accidents in these cases. The fall of the apple for Newton, Laennec's observation of the little boys tapping on a log in the courtyard of the Louvre, from which he got his idea for the invention of the stethoscope, were apparently merest accidents. Without the inventive scientific genius ready to take advantage of them, however, these accidents would not have been raised to the higher planes of important incidents in history. They would have meant nothing. The phenomena had probably occurred under men's eyes hundreds of times before, but there was no great mind ready to receive the seeds of thought it suggested and go on to follow out the conclusions so obviously indicated. Galvani's observation of the twitching of the muscles of the frog under the influence of electricity may be called one of the happy accidents of scientific development, but it was Galvani's own genius that made the accident happy.

There are two stories told as to the method of the first observation in this matter. Both of them make his wife an important factor in the discovery. According to the more popular form of the history, Galvani was engaged in preparing some frog's legs as a special dainty for his wife, who was ill and who liked this delicacy very much. He thought so much of her that he was doing this himself in the hope that she would be thus more readily tempted to eat them. While so engaged he exposed the large nerve of the animals' hind legs and at the same time split the skin covering the muscles. In doing this he touched the nerve-muscle preparation, as this has come to be called, with the scalpel and little forceps simultaneously, with the result that twitchings occurred. While seeking for the cause of these twitchings the idea of animal electricity came to him.

The other form of the story of his original discovery is not {120} less interesting and is perhaps a little more authentic. One evening he was engaged in his laboratory in making some experiments while some friends and his wife were present. By chance some frogs, the hind legs of which had been stripped of skin, were placed upon the table not far from an apparatus for the generation of frictional electricity. They were not in contact with this apparatus at any point, however, though they were not far distant from the conductor. While the apparatus was being used to produce a series of sparks, a laboratory a.s.sistant, without thinking of any possible results, touched with the point of a scalpel the sciatic nerves of one of the animals. Just as soon as he did this all the muscles of this limb went into convulsive movement.

It was Galvani's wife who noticed what had happened and who had the a.s.sistant use the scalpel once more with the same result.

She was herself a woman of well-developed intellect, and her a.s.sociation with her father and husband made her well acquainted with the anatomy and physiology of the day. She realized that what had occurred was quite out of the ordinary. Accordingly, she called the attention of her husband to the phenomena, and is even said to have suggested their possible connection with the presence and action of the electric apparatus. Husband and wife then together, by means of a series of observations, determined that whenever the apparatus was not in use the phenomenon of the conclusive movements of the frog's legs did not take place, notwithstanding irritation by the scalpel.

Whenever the electric apparatus was working, however, then the phenomenon in question always took place. According to either form of the story it is clear that Madame Galvani had an important part in the discovery, and Galvani himself, far from making little of what she had accomplished, was always {121} glad to attribute his discovery, or at least the suggestive hint that led up to it, to his wife.

After these first discoveries on the influence of artificial electricity, nothing seemed more interesting than to investigate whether ordinary atmospheric electricity as manifested in lightning would produce the same effects on muscular movements. In this matter Galvani showed much courage as an inventive genius. He dared to place an atmospheric conductor on the highest point of his house and to this conductor he attached a wire, which ran down to his laboratory. During a storm he suspended on this metallic circuit by means of their sciatic nerves frogs' legs and the legs of other animals prepared for the purpose. To the feet of the animals he attached another wire sufficiently long to reach down to the bottom of a well, thus completing a current to the ground.

All the phenomena took place exactly as if with artificial electricity. Whenever lightning flashed from the clouds the limbs of the animals experimented with underwent violent contractions, which were noticeable before the noise of the thunder, and were, so to say, the signal for it. These contractions took place, although there were no conductors from the muscles, and although the nerve conductors were not isolated. The muscular contractions were greater in proportion than the intensity of the lightning and the proximity of the storm.

The phenomena were manifest whether the animal was in the open air or if, for greater convenience, it was enclosed in a room, or even in a vessel. The muscular contractions could even be noticed despite the fact that the nerves were separated somewhat from their conductor, especially whenever the lightning was violent. The sparks would leap over a small gap almost as in the case of artificial electricity, the muscular contraction of the animal {122} being proportioned to the energy and the nearness of the sparks.

It is almost needless to say, these experiments upon the frog were not accomplished in a few days or a few weeks. Galvani had his duties as Professor of Anatomy to attend to, besides the obligations imposed upon him as a busy pract.i.tioner of medicine and surgery. At that time it was not nearly so much the custom as it is at present, to use frogs for experiments, with the idea that conclusions might be obtained of value for the biological sciences generally, and especially for medicine. There has always been an undercurrent of feeling that such experiments are more or less a beating of the air. Galvani found opposition not only to his views with regard to animal electricity as enunciated after experimental demonstration, but also met with no little ridicule because of the supposed waste of time at occupations that could not be expected to lead to any practical results. It was the custom among scientific men to laugh somewhat scornfully at his patient persistence in studying out every detail of electrical action on the frog, and one of the supposedly prominent scientists of the time even dubbed him the frog dancing master. This did not, however, deter Galvani from his work, though some of the bitter things must have proved cutting enough, and might have discouraged a smaller man, less confident of the scientific value of the work that he was doing.

There were even phases of physical science quite apart from physiology or animal electricity, which he was able to ill.u.s.trate by his experiments. He called special attention, for instance, to the fact that the lightning does not excite a single contraction of the muscle as is the case with a spark of artificial electricity, but that there are a series of muscular contractions succeeding one another rapidly in diminishing {123} energy and somewhat corresponding to the reiterated reports of thunder. This was Galvani's expression for the dying away of the electrical influence upon the muscle. He had thus evidently reached a hint of the pendulum-like swing with which electrical equilibrium is restored after its violent disturbance immediately following the lightning stroke. He noted, moreover, that for the production of muscular contractions the absolute appearance of lightning was not indispensable. Muscular twitchings were noted whenever the heavens were overclouded by a storm, or whenever clouds charged with electricity were pa.s.sed above the conductor.

These experiments were made upon living frogs, as well as upon the separated legs, and in both cases the results obtained were very similar to those observed on the employment of some form of artificial electricity. In some of these observations, Galvani was antic.i.p.ating ideas that became current truth in electrical science only many years after his time. In his observations upon the effects of lightning, he was forestalling Franklin's works to a certain extent. Both of these great scientists, however, had been antic.i.p.ated by a clergyman in Austria; whose work attracted very little attention, however, because he was not in touch with the scientific bodies of the day. The demonstration of the ident.i.ty of ordinary terrestrial artificial electricity and the lightning was in the air, as it were, and many workers, as is usually the case with any great discovery, came very close to it, and deserve at least a portion of the credit for it.

It is almost needless to say, many of these experiments with lightning thus conducted by Galvani were not without an element of serious personal danger. Not long after this time a Russian savant, Richman by name, while repeating Franklin's experiments with the kite, was struck dead by the charge received from his apparatus. Galvani, however, {124} devoted himself only in pa.s.sing to the physical problems involved, and kept always in view the physiological aspects of the problem of animal electricity; and, accordingly, made a series of most interesting observations on the ray fish or torpedo, as it is sometimes called, the fish which gives electrical shocks. His idea was to demonstrate that the shocks felt when this animal is touched are really due to sparks of electricity similar to those which can be obtained by artificial means. This had never been determined, and Galvani succeeded in showing the presence of sparks exactly as if the animal were one of the apparatuses by which the sparks of frictional electricity are developed. At this time this seemed surprising enough.

Galvani also endeavored to demonstrate that the electricity in the electric torpedo differed only in degree, but not in quality, from certain electric manifestations that he had noted in the bodies of other animals, especially the frog. His idea always was to show the existence of a natural animal electricity, by means of which some of the complex mechanism of life was accomplished. He seems to have had some notion of the theory that has been suggested often enough since, and is not yet entirely disproved, that there is some very close relationship between nerve impulses and the electric current. In this, of course, he was far ahead of his time, and utterly unable to make absolute demonstration, because of the lack of proper apparatus.

The most interesting quality of Galvani's scientific career is the thoroughly experimental character of all his researches into natural phenomena. Few men have known so well how to vary their experiments so as to bring out new details of scientific knowledge. His experimental skill was of the highest order, and it is to this that we owe the development in his hands of the nascent science of electricity to a point {125} where it became easy to continue its natural evolution.

Galvani's work furnished the necessary stimulus to Volta, and then the real foundation of modern electricity was laid.

Almost more interesting than Galvani the scientist, however, is Galvani the man. As one of his biographers said of him, he joined to the most eminent intellectual genius a group of very precious qualities of the heart. Utterly unselfish in his relationship to others, he was known to be extremely sympathetic and had a large number of friends. His friends, too, he bound to him by even more than the proverbial hoops of steel, so that when they pa.s.sed out of life they left him unconsolable. While it was very hard to get him to take part in social functions at which numbers of people were gathered, he was by no means a recluse, and liked to be in the company of a few friends. He seemed to care very little for the renown that his discoveries gave him, and refused, as far as possible, to be made the object of public congratulations and testimonials.

His relations with his patients--for during all of his long career he continued to practise, especially surgery and obstetrics--were of the friendliest character. While his distinction as a professor at the university gave him many opportunities for practice among the rich, he was always ready and willing to help the poor, and, indeed, seemed to feel more at home among poor patients than in the society of the wealthy and n.o.ble. Even towards the end of his life, when the loss of many friends, and especially his wife, made him retire within himself much more than before, he continued to exercise his professional skill for the benefit of the poor, though he often refused to take cases that might have proved sources of considerable gain to him. Early in life, when he was very busy between his professional work and his practice, he remarked more than once, on refusing {126} to take the cases of wealthy patients, that they had the money with which to obtain other physicians, while the poor did not, and he would prefer to keep some time for his services for them.

Toward the end of his life Galvani was not a little perturbed by the course of events around him and by the sweeping away of faith in old beliefs, consequent upon the French Revolution and the philosophic movement that had led up to it. Seeing around him, too, the abuses to which this supposed liberty and a.s.sertion of the rights of man led, it used to be a favorite expression of Galvani that "A little philosophy led men away from G.o.d, but a good deal of it led them back to Him again." Especially did he consider this true with regard to younger men, whose lack of wisdom in the difficult phases of life made them think their philosophy of things was complete, until sad experience had taught them the necessity for lifting men's minds above any mere religion of humanity, any mere stoic resignation to the inevitable, if what was best in them was to be brought out.

A very interesting phase of the Italian university life of that time is revealed in two important incidents of Galvani's university career.

One of his professors, one, by the way, for whom he seems to have had a great deal of respect, and to whose lectures he devoted much attention, was Laura Caterina Maria Ba.s.si, the distinguished woman professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna, about the middle of the eighteenth century. It is doubtless to her teaching that Galvani owes some of his thoroughgoing conservatism in philosophic speculation, a conservatism that was of great service to him later on in life, in the midst of the ultra-radical principles which became fashionable just before and during the French Revolution. Madame Ba.s.si seems to have had her influence on him for good not only during his student {127} career, but also later in life, for she was the wife of a prominent physician in Bologna, and Galvani was often in social contact with her during his years of connection with the university.

As might, perhaps, be expected, seeing that his own happy domestic life showed him that an educated woman might be the centre of intellectual influence, Galvani seems to have had no spirit of opposition to even the highest education for women. This is very well ill.u.s.trated by the first formal lecture in his course on anatomy at the university, which had for its subject the models for the teaching of anatomy that had been made by Madame Manzolini. In the early part of the eighteenth century Madame Manzolini had been the professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, and in order to make the teaching of this difficult subject easier and more definite she modelled with great care and delicate attention to every detail, so that they imitated actual dissections of the human body very closely, a set of wax figures which replaced the human body for demonstration purposes at least at the beginning of the anatomical course.

Galvani, in taking up the work of lecturer on anatomy, appreciated how much such a set of models would help in making the introduction to anatomical study easy, yet at the same time without detracting from its exactness, and, accordingly, introduced his students to Madame Manzolini's set of models in his very first lecture. At the time there were those connected with the teaching of anatomy who considered the use of these models as rather an effeminate proceeding. Galvani's lack of prejudice in the matter shows the readiness of the man to accept the best wherever he found it without regard to persons or feelings.

He was one of the most popular professors that the University of Bologna has ever had. He was not in the ordinary {128} sense of the word an orator, but he was a born teacher. The source of the enthusiasm which he aroused in his hearers was undoubtedly his own love for teaching and the power it gave him to express even intricate problems in simple, straightforward language. More than any of his predecessors he understood that experiments and demonstrations must be the real groundwork of the teaching of science. Accordingly, very few of his lectures were given without the aid of these material helps to attract attention. Besides he was known to be one who delighted to answer questions and was perfectly frank about the limitations of his knowledge whenever there was no real answer to be given to a question that had been proposed. Though an original discoverer of the first rank, he was extremely modest, particularly when talking about the details of his discoveries, or subjects relating to them.

The most striking proof of the thorough conscientiousness with which he faced the duties of life is to be found in his conduct after the establishment of the so-called Cis-Alpine Republic in Italy. This was a government established merely by force of arms without the consent of the people and a plain usurpation of the rights of the previous government. He considered himself bound in duty to the authority under which he had lived all his previous life and to which he had sworn fealty. When the University of Bologna was reorganized under the new government the first requirement of all those who were made professors was that they should take the oath of allegiance to the new government. This he refused to do. His motives can be readily understood, and though practically all the other professors of the university had taken the oath he did not consider that this freed him from his conscientious obligations in the matter.

Accordingly, he was dropped from the roll of professors {129} and deprived of the never very large salary which he had obtained from this chair. On this sum he had practically depended for his existence and he soon began to suffer from want. While he had been a successful pract.i.tioner of medicine, especially of surgery, he had always been very liberal and had spent large sums of money in demonstrations for his lectures and personal experimentation and in materials for the museums of the university. He began to suffer from actual want and friends had to come to his a.s.sistance. He refused, however, to give up his scruples in the matter and accept the professorship which was still open for him. Finally, at the end of two years, influence was brought to bear on the new government and Galvani was allowed to accept his chair in the university without taking the oath of allegiance. This tribute came too late, however, and within a short time after his restoration to his professorship he died.

That his action in this matter was very properly appreciated by his contemporaries, and that the moral influence of his example was not lost, can be realized from the expressions used by Alibert, the Secretary-general of the Medical Society of Emulation, in the historical address on Galvani which he delivered before that society in 1801: