The Evolution of Modern Medicine Part 1

The Evolution of Modern Medicine.

by William Osler.

THE SILLIMAN FOUNDATION

IN the year 1883 a legacy of eighty thousand dollars was left to the President and Fellows of Yale College in the city of New Haven, to be held in trust, as a gift from her children, in memory of their beloved and honored mother, Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman.

On this foundation Yale College was requested and directed to establish an annual course of lectures designed to ill.u.s.trate the presence and providence, the wisdom and goodness of G.o.d, as manifested in the natural and moral world. These were to be designated as the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures. It was the belief of the testator that any orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to the end of this foundation more effectively than any attempt to emphasize the elements of doctrine or of creed; and he therefore provided that lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be excluded from the scope of this foundation, and that the subjects should be selected rather from the domains of natural science and history, giving special prominence to astronomy, chemistry, geology and anatomy.

It was further directed that each annual course should be made the basis of a volume to form part of a series const.i.tuting a memorial to Mrs.

Silliman. The memorial fund came into the possession of the Corporation of Yale University in the year 1901; and the present volume const.i.tutes the tenth of the series of memorial lectures.

PREFACE

THE ma.n.u.script of Sir William Osler's lectures on the "Evolution of Modern Medicine," delivered at Yale University in April, 1913, on the Silliman Foundation, was immediately turned in to the Yale University Press for publication. Duly set in type, proofs in galley form had been submitted to him and despite countless interruptions he had already corrected and revised a number of the galleys when the great war came.

But with the war on, he threw himself with energy and devotion into the military and public duties which devolved upon him and so never completed his proof-reading and intended alterations. The careful corrections which Sir William made in the earlier galleys show that the lectures were dictated, in the first instance, as loose memoranda for oral delivery rather than as finished compositions for the eye, while maintaining throughout the logical continuity and the engaging con moto which were so characteristic of his literary style. In revising the lectures for publication, therefore, the editors have merely endeavored to carry out, with care and befitting reverence, the indications supplied in the earlier galleys by Sir William himself. In supplying dates and references which were lacking, his preferences as to editions and readings have been borne in mind. The slight alterations made, the adaptation of the text to the eye, detract nothing from the original freshness of the work.

In a letter to one of the editors, Osler described these lectures as "an aeroplane flight over the progress of medicine through the ages." They are, in effect, a sweeping panoramic survey of the whole vast field, covering wide areas at a rapid pace, yet with an extraordinary variety of detail. The slow, painful character of the evolution of medicine from the fearsome, superst.i.tious mental complex of primitive man, with his amulets, healing G.o.ds and disease demons, to the ideal of a clear-eyed rationalism is traced with faith and a serene sense of continuity. The author saw clearly and felt deeply that the men who have made an idea or discovery viable and valuable to humanity are the deserving men; he has made the great names shine out, without any depreciation of the important work of lesser men and without cluttering up his narrative with the tedious prehistory of great discoveries or with shrill claims to priority. Of his skill in differentiating the sundry "strains"

of medicine, there is specific witness in each section. Osler's wide culture and control of the best available literature of his subject permitted him to range the ampler aether of Greek medicine or the earth-fettered schools of today with equal mastery; there is no quickset of pedantry between the author and the reader. The ill.u.s.trations (which he had doubtless planned as fully for the last as for the earlier chapters) are as he left them; save that, lacking legends, these have been supplied and a few which could not be identified have with regret been omitted. The original galley proofs have been revised and corrected from different viewpoints by Fielding H. Garrison, Harvey Cushing, Edward C. Streeter and latterly by Leonard L. Mackall (Savannah, Ga.), whose zeal and persistence in the painstaking verification of citations and references cannot be too highly commended.

In the present revision, a number of important corrections, most of them based upon the original MS., have been made by Dr. W.W. Francis (Oxford), Dr. Charles Singer (London), Dr. E.C. Streeter, Mr. L.L.

Mackall and others.

This work, composed originally for a lay audience and for popular consumption, will be to the aspiring medical student and the hardworking pract.i.tioner a lift into the blue, an inspiring vista or "Pisgah-sight"

of the evolution of medicine, a realization of what devotion, perseverance, valor and ability on the part of physicians have contributed to this progress, and of the creditable part which our profession has played in the general development of science.

The editors have no hesitation in presenting these lectures to the profession and to the reading public as one of the most characteristic productions of the best-balanced, best-equipped, most sagacious and most lovable of all modern physicians.

F.H.G.

BUT on that account, I say, we ought not to reject the ancient Art, as if it were not, and had not been properly founded, because it did not attain accuracy in all things, but rather, since it is capable of reaching to the greatest exact.i.tude by reasoning, to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made, and not from chance. (Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine, Adams edition, Vol. 1, 1849, p. 168.)

THE true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers. (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorisms, Lx.x.xI, Spedding's translation.)

A GOLDEN thread has run throughout the history of the world, consecutive and continuous, the work of the best men in successive ages. From point to point it still runs, and when near you feel it as the clear and bright and searchingly irresistible light which Truth throws forth when great minds conceive it. (Walter Moxon, Pilocereus Senilis and Other Papers, 1887, p. 4.)

FOR the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought. It is true that the medicine which is now in vogue contains little of which the utility is remarkable; but, without having any intention of decrying it, I am sure that there is no one, even among those who make its study a profession, who does not confess that all that men know is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. (Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Philosophical Works. Translated by E. S.

Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. I, Cam. Univ. Press, 1911, p. 120.)

CHAPTER I -- ORIGIN OF MEDICINE

INTRODUCTION

SAIL to the Pacific with some Ancient Mariner, and traverse day by day that silent sea until you reach a region never before furrowed by keel where a tiny island, a mere speck on the vast ocean, has just risen from the depths, a little coral reef capped with green, an atoll, a mimic earth, fringed with life, built up through countless ages by life on the remains of life that has pa.s.sed away. And now, with wings of fancy, join Ianthe in the magic car of Sh.e.l.ley, pa.s.s the eternal gates of the flaming ramparts of the world and see his vision:

Below lay stretched the boundless Universe!

There, far as the remotest line That limits swift imagination's flight, Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion, Immutably fulfilling Eternal Nature's law.

Above, below, around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony.

(Daemon of the World, Pt. I.)

And somewhere, "as fast and far the chariot flew," amid the mighty globes would be seen a tiny speck, "earth's distant orb," one of "the smallest lights that twinkle in the heavens." Alighting, Ianthe would find something she had probably not seen elsewhere in her magic flight--life, everywhere encircling the sphere. And as the little coral reef out of a vast depth had been built up by generations of polyzoa, so she would see that on the earth, through illimitable ages, successive generations of animals and plants had left in stone their imperishable records: and at the top of the series she would meet the thinking, breathing creature known as man. Infinitely little as is the architect of the atoll in proportion to the earth on which it rests, the polyzoon, I doubt not, is much larger relatively than is man in proportion to the vast systems of the Universe, in which he represents an ultra-microscopic atom less ten thousand times than the tiniest of the "gay motes that people the sunbeams." Yet, with colossal audacity, this thinking atom regards himself as the anthropocentric pivot around which revolve the eternal purposes of the Universe. Knowing not whence he came, why he is here, or whither he is going, man feels himself of supreme importance, and certainly is of interest--to himself. Let us hope that he has indeed a potency and importance out of all proportion to his somatic insignificance. We know of toxins of such strength that an amount too infinitesimal to be gauged may kill; and we know that "the unit adopted in certain scientific work is the amount of emanation produced by one million-millionth of a grain of radium, a quant.i.ty which itself has a volume of less than a million-millionth of a cubic millimetre and weighs a million million times less than an exceptionally delicate chemical balance will turn to" (Soddy, 1912). May not man be the radium of the Universe? At any rate let us not worry about his size.

For us he is a very potent creature, full of interest, whose mundane story we are only beginning to unravel.

Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man. Go back as far as his records carry us and the story written on stone is of yesterday in comparison with the vast epochs of time which modern studies demand for his life on the earth. For two millions (some hold even three millions) of years man lived and moved and had his being in a world very different from that upon which we look out. There appear, indeed, to have been various types of man, some as different from us as we are from the anthropoid apes. What upstarts of yesterday are the Pharaohs in comparison with the men who survived the tragedy of the glacial period!

The ancient history of man--only now beginning to be studied--dates from the Pliocene or Miocene period; the modern history, as we know it, embraces that brief s.p.a.ce of time that has elapsed since the earliest Egyptian and Babylonian records were made. This has to be borne in mind in connection with the present mental status of man, particularly in his outlook upon nature. In his thoughts and in his attributes, mankind at large is controlled by inherited beliefs and impulses, which countless thousands of years have ingrained like instinct. Over vast regions of the earth today, magic, amulets, charms, incantations are the chief weapons of defense against a malignant nature; and in disease, the practice of Asa(*) is comparatively novel and unusual; in days of illness many millions more still seek their G.o.ds rather than the physicians. In an upward path man has had to work out for himself a relationship with his fellows and with nature. He sought in the supernatural an explanation of the pressing phenomena of life, peopling the world with spiritual beings, deifying objects of nature, and a.s.signing to them benign or malign influences, which might be invoked or propitiated. Primitive priest, physician and philosopher were one, and struggled, on the one hand, for the recognition of certain practices forced on him by experience, and on the other, for the recognition of mystical agencies which control the dark, "uncharted region" about him--to use Prof. Gilbert Murray's phrase--and were responsible for everything he could not understand, and particularly for the mysteries of disease. Pliny remarks that physic "was early fathered upon the G.o.ds"; and to the ordinary non-medical mind, there is still something mysterious about sickness, something outside the ordinary standard.

(*) II Chronicles xvi, 12.

Modern anthropologists claim that both religion and medicine took origin in magic, "that spiritual protoplasm," as Miss Jane Harrison calls it.

To primitive man, magic was the setting in motion of a spiritual power to help or to hurt the individual, and early forms may still be studied in the native races. This power, or "mana," as it is called, while possessed in a certain degree by all, may be increased by practice.

Certain individuals come to possess it very strongly: among native Australians today it is still deliberately cultivated. Magic in healing seeks to control the demons, or forces; causing disease; and in a way it may be thus regarded as a "lineal ancestor of modern science" (Whetham), which, too, seeks to control certain forces, no longer, however, regarded as supernatural.

Primitive man recognized many of these superhuman agencies relating to disease, such as the spirits of the dead, either human or animal, independent disease demons, or individuals who might act by controlling the spirits or agencies of disease. We see this today among the negroes of the Southern States. A Hoodoo put upon a negro may, if he knows of it, work upon him so powerfully through the imagination that he becomes very ill indeed, and only through a more powerful magic exercised by someone else can the Hoodoo be taken off.

To primitive man life seemed "full of sacred presences" (Walter Pater) connected with objects in nature, or with incidents and epochs in life, which he began early to deify, so that, until a quite recent period, his story is largely a.s.sociated with a pantheon of greater and lesser G.o.ds, which he has manufactured wholesale. Xenophanes was the earliest philosopher to recognize man's practice of making G.o.ds in his own image and endowing them with human faculties and attributes; the Thracians, he said, made their G.o.ds blue-eyed and red-haired, the Ethiopians, snub-nosed and black, while, if oxen and lions and horses had hands and could draw, they would represent their G.o.ds as oxen and lions and horses. In relation to nature and to disease, all through early history we find a pantheon full to repletion, bearing testimony no less to the fertility of man's imagination than to the hopes and fears which led him, in his exodus from barbarism, to regard his G.o.ds as "pillars of fire by night, and pillars of cloud by day."

Even so late a religion as that of Numa was full of little G.o.ds to be invoked on special occasions--Vatican, who causes the infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus, who prompts his first word, Cuba, who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca, who watches over one's safe home-coming (Walter Pater); and Numa believed that all diseases came from the G.o.ds and were to be averted by prayer and sacrifice. Besides the major G.o.ds, representatives of Apollo, AEsculapius and Minerva, there were scores of lesser ones who could be invoked for special diseases. It is said that the young Roman mother might appeal to no less than fourteen G.o.ddesses, from Juno Lucina to Prosa and Portvorta (Withington). Temples were erected to the G.o.ddess of Fever, and she was much invoked. There is extant a touching tablet erected by a mourning mother and inscribed:

Febri divae, Febri Sancte, Febri magnae Camillo amato pro Filio meld effecto. Posuit.

It is marvellous what a long line of superhuman powers, major and minor, man has invoked against sickness. In Swinburne's words:

G.o.d by G.o.d flits past in thunder till his glories turn to shades, G.o.d by G.o.d bears wondering witness how his Gospel flames and fades; More was each of these, while yet they were, than man their servant seemed; Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed.

Most of them have been benign and helpful G.o.ds. Into the dark chapters relating to demonical possession and to witchcraft we cannot here enter. They make one cry out with Lucretius (Bk. V):

O genus infelix humanum, talia divis c.u.m tribuit facta atque iras adjunxit acerbas!

Quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque n.o.bis Vulnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris.

In every age, and in every religion there has been justification for his bitter words, "tantum religio potuit suadere malorum"--"Such wrongs Religion in her train doth bring"--yet, one outcome of "a belief in spiritual beings"--as Tylor defines religion--has been that man has built an altar of righteousness in his heart. The comparative method applied to the study of his religious growth has shown how man's thoughts have widened in the unceasing purpose which runs through his spiritual no less than his physical evolution. Out of the spiritual protoplasm of magic have evolved philosopher and physician, as well as priest. Magic and religion control the uncharted sphere--the supernatural, the superhuman: science seeks to know the world, and through knowing, to control it. Ray Lankester remarks that Man is Nature's rebel, and goes on to say: "The mental qualities which have developed in Man, though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition in some of his animal a.s.sociates, are of such an unprecedented power and so far dominate everything else in his activities as a living organism, that they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the general operation of that process of Natural Selection and survival of the fittest which up to their appearance had been the law of the living world. They justify the view that Man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason, self-consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man."(1) It has been a slow and gradual growth, and not until within the past century has science organized knowledge--so searched out the secrets of Nature, as to control her powers, limit her scope and transform her energies. The victory is so recent that the mental att.i.tude of the race is not yet adapted to the change. A large proportion of our fellow creatures still regard nature as a playground for demons and spirits to be exorcised or invoked.

(1) Sir E. Ray Lankester: Romanes Lecture, "Nature and Man,"

Oxford Univ. Press, 1905, p. 21.

Side by side, as substance and shadow--"in the dark backward and abysm of time," in the dawn of the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon, in the bright morning of Greece, and in the full noontide of modern life, together have grown up these two diametrically opposite views of man's relation to nature, and more particularly of his personal relation to the agencies of disease.