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BY PROFESSOR HOLMES. 
 
 CUEKENTS AND COIJNTEE-CUEEENTS IN MEDICAL 
 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 With other Essays. 
 
 1 vol. 12mo. Uniform with this volume. Cloth, $ 1.26. 
 
 TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers. 
 
BOKDEE LINES OFMOWLEME 
 
 IN SOME PROVINCES OF 
 
 MEDICAL SCIENCE 
 
 AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE, 
 
 Delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard University, 
 November 6th, 1861. 
 
 By OLIVEE WENDELL HOLMES, M. D„ 
 
 PARKMAN PROFESSOR OP ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TIOKNOR AND FIELDS 
 
 18 62. 
 
. . . ' ■ . , . 
 
 • ' . * 
 
 tuOuOGt 
 UB3A*& 
 
 2^ 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 
 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 Cambridge: 
 
 Which, Bigelow, and Company, 
 
 Printers to the University. 
 
College Library, November 22, 1861. 
 
 Professor 0. W. Holmes: — 
 Dear Sir, — At a meeting of the Medical Class it was unanimously 
 voted, that your Introductory Address be published. We therefore take 
 much pleasure in requesting of you a copy for that purpose. 
 
 Truly your friends, 
 
 WM. J. RADFORD, Chairman. 
 W. K. FLETCHER, 
 W. H. MACDONALD, \ 
 D. H. HAYDEN, 
 
 '} 
 
 Boston, November 25, 1861. 
 
 Gentlemen: — 
 It pleases me to comply with the request you have addressed me, in 
 accordance with the vote of the Medical Class, to furnish you a copy 
 of my Introductory Lecture for publication. 
 
 Very truly your friend, 
 
 0. W. HOLMES. 
 Messrs. Wm. J. Radford, Chairman. 
 
 W. K. Fletcher, ~\ 
 
 W. H. Macdonald, >• Committee. 
 
 D. H. Hayden, ) 
 
 615817 
 
TO THE READER 
 
 This Lecture appears as it would have been delivered 
 had the time allowed been less strictly limited. Passages 
 necessarily omitted have been restored, and points briefly 
 touched have been more fully considered. A few notes 
 have been added for the benefit of that limited class of 
 students who care to track an author through the high- 
 ways and by-ways of his reading. I owe my thanks to 
 several of my professional brethren who have communi- 
 cated with me on subjects with which they are familiar ; 
 especially to Dr. John Dean, for the opportunity of profit- 
 ing by his unpublished labors, and to Dr. Hasket Derby, 
 for information and references to recent authorities relating 
 to the anatomy and physiology of the eye. 
 
LECTURE. 
 
 The entrance upon a new course of Lectures is 
 always a period of interest to instructors and pupils. 
 As the birth of a child to a parent, so is the advent of 
 a new class to a teacher. As the light of the untried 
 world to the infant, so is the dawning of the light rest- 
 ing over the unexplored realms of science to the stu- 
 dent. In the name of the Faculty I welcome you, 
 Gentlemen of the Medical Class, new-born babes of 
 science, or lustier nurslings, to this morning of your 
 medical life, and to the arms and the bosom of this 
 ancient University. Fourteen years ago I stood in 
 this place for the first time to address those who occu- 
 pied these benches. As I recall these past seasons of 
 our joint labors, I feel that they have been on the 
 whole prosperous, and not undeserving of their pros- 
 perity. For it has been my privilege to be associated 
 with a body of true and faithful workers ; I cannot 
 praise them freely to their faces, or I should be proud 
 to discourse of the harmonious diligence and the noble 
 spirit in which they have toiled together, not merely 
 
6 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 to teach their several branches, but to elevate the 
 whole standard of teaching. 
 
 I may speak with less restraint of those gentlemen 
 who have aided me in the most laborious part of my 
 daily duties, the Demonstrators, to whom the succes- 
 sive classes have owed so much of their instruction. 
 They rise before me, the dead and the living, in the 
 midst of the most grateful recollections. The fair, 
 manly face and stately figure of my friend, Dr. Sam- 
 uel Parkman, himself fit for the highest offices of 
 teaching, yet willing to be my faithful assistant in the 
 time of need, come back to me with the long sigh of 
 regret for his early loss to our earthly companionship. 
 Every year I speak the eulogy of Dr. Ainsworth's pa- 
 tient toil as I show his elaborate preparations. When 
 I take down my American Cyclopaedia and borrow in- 
 struction from the learned articles of Dr. Kneeland, 
 I cease to regret that his indefatigable and intelligent 
 industry was turned into a broader channel. And 
 what can I say too cordial of my long associated com- 
 panion and friend, Dr. Hodges, whose admirable skill, 
 working through the swiftest and surest fingers that 
 ever held a scalpel among us, has delighted class after 
 class, and filled our Museum with monuments which 
 will convey his name to unborn generations ? 
 
 This day belongs, however, not to myself and my 
 recollections, but to all of us who teach and all of you 
 who listen, whether experts in our specialties or aliens 
 to their mysteries, or timid neophytes just entering the 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 7 
 
 portals of the hall of science. Look in with me, then, 
 while I attempt to throw some rays into its interior, 
 which shall illuminate a few of its pillars and cornices, 
 and show at the same time how many niches and al- 
 coves remain in darkness. 
 
 Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few 
 elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, enclosing in- 
 finite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up 
 a little sand from abysses we shall never reach with 
 our dredges. 
 
 The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches 
 us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins. 
 Nothing more clearly separates a vulgar from a supe- 
 rior mind, than the confusion in the first between the 
 little that it truly knows, on the one hand, and what it 
 half knows and what it thinks it knows, on the other. 
 
 That which is true of every subject is especially true 
 of the branch of knowledge which deals with living 
 beings. Their existence is a perpetual death and re- 
 animation. Their identity is only an idea, for we put 
 off our bodies many times during our lives, and dress 
 in new suits of bones and muscles.* 
 
 " Thou art not thyself; 
 . For thou exist' st on many a thousand grains 
 N That issue out of dust." 
 
 * " Occasio enim praeceps est propter artis materiam, dico autem cor- 
 pus, quod continue Suit et momento temporis transmutatur." — Galen. 
 Com. in Aphorism. Hippoc. 1. 1. 
 
8 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 If it is true that we understand ourselves but imper- 
 fectly in health, it is more signally manifest in disease, 
 where natural actions imperfectly understood, disturbed 
 in an obscure way by half-seen causes, are creeping and 
 winding along in the dark toward their destined issue, 
 sometimes using our remedies as safe stepping-stones, 
 occasionally, it may be, stumbling over them as ob- 
 stacles. 
 
 I propose in this lecture to show you some points of 
 contact between our ignorance and our knowledge in 
 several of the branches upon the study of which you 
 are entering. I may teach you a very little directly, 
 but I hope much more from the trains of thought I 
 shall suggest. Do not expect too much ground to be 
 covered in this rapid survey. Our task is only that of 
 sending out a few pickets under the starry flag of sci- 
 ence to the edge of that dark domain where the ensigns 
 of the obstinate rebel, Ignorance, are flying undisputed. 
 We are not making a reconnoissance in force, still less 
 advancing with the main column. But here are a few 
 roads along which we have to march together, and we 
 wish to see clearly how far our lines extend, and where 
 the enemy's outposts begin. 
 
 Before touching the branches of knowledge that deal 
 with organization and vital functions, let us glance at 
 that science which meets you at the threshold of your 
 study, and prepares you in some measure to deal with 
 the more complex problems of the living laboratory. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 9 
 
 Chemistry includes the art of separating and com- 
 bining the elements of matter, and the study of the 
 changes produced by these operations. We can hardly 
 say too much of what it has contributed to our knowl- 
 edge of the universe and our power of dealing with its 
 materials. It has given us a catalogue raisonnS of the 
 substances found upon our planet, and shown how 
 everything living and dead is put together from them. 
 It is accomplishing wonders before us every day, such 
 as Arabian story-tellers used to string together in their 
 fables. It spreads the sensitive film on the artificial 
 retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens 
 for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive 
 its original. It questions the light of the sun, and de- 
 tects the vaporized metals floating around the great 
 luminary, — iron, sodium, lithium, and the rest, — as 
 if the chemist of our remote planet could fill his bell- 
 glasses from its fiery atmosphere.* It lends the power 
 which flashes our messages in thrills that leave the lazy 
 chariot of day behind them. It seals up a few dark 
 grains in iron vases, and lo ! at the touch of a single 
 spark, rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a 
 voice like thunder and an arm that shatters like an 
 earthquake. The dreams of Oriental fancy have be- 
 come the sober facts of our every-day life, and the 
 chemist is the magician to whom we owe them. 
 
 To return to the colder scientific aspect of chemis- 
 
 * Scientific Annual for 1861. — Fairbairn's Address before the British 
 Association, 1861. 
 
10 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 try. It has shown us how bodies stand affected to 
 each other through an almost boundless range of com- 
 binations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to 
 account for certain fixed relations in these combina- 
 tions. It has successfully eliminated a great number 
 of proximate compounds, more or less stable, from or- 
 ganic structures. It has invented others which form 
 the basis of long series of well-known composite sub- 
 stances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overbur- 
 dened with our list of proximate principles, demon- 
 strated and hypothetical. 
 
 How much nearer have we come to the secret of 
 force than Lully and Geber and the whole crew of 
 juggling alchemists ? We have learned a great deal 
 about the how, what have we learned about the why ? 
 
 Why does iron rust, while gold remains untarnished, 
 and gold amalgamate, while iron refuses the alliance of 
 mercury ? 
 
 The alchemists called gold Sol, the sun, and iron 
 Mars, and pleased themselves with fancied relations 
 between these substances and the heavenly bodies, by 
 which they pretended to explain the facts they ob- 
 served. Some of their superstitions have lingered in 
 practical medicine to the present day, but chemistry 
 has grown wise enough to confess the fact of absolute 
 ignorance. 
 
 What is it that makes common salt crystallize in the 
 form of cubes, and saltpetre in the shape of six-sided 
 prisms ? We see no reason why it should not have 
 
W MEDICAL SCIENCE. 11 
 
 been just the other way, salt in prisms and saltpetre 
 in cubes, or why either should take an exact geometri- 
 cal outline, any more than coagulating albumen. 
 
 But although we had given up attempting to explain 
 the essential nature of affinities and of crystalline types, 
 we might have supposed that we had at least fixed the 
 identity of the substances with which we deal, and de- 
 termined the laws of their combination. All at once 
 we find that a simple substance changes face, puts off its 
 characteristic qualities and resumes them at will; — not 
 merely when we liquefy or vaporize a solid, or reverse 
 the process ; but that a solid is literally transformed 
 into another solid under our own eyes. We thought 
 we knew phosphorus. We warm a portion of it sealed 
 in an empty tube, for about a week. It has become a 
 brown infusible substance, which does not shine in the 
 dark nor oxidate in the air. We heat it to 500° F., 
 and it becomes common phosphorus again. We trans- 
 mute sulphur in the same singular way. Nature, you 
 know, gives us carbon in the shape of coal and in that 
 of the diamond. It is easy to call these changes by the 
 name allotrojoism, but not the less do they confound our 
 hasty generalizations. 
 
 These facts of allotropism have some corollaries con- 
 nected with them rather startling to us of the nine- 
 teenth century. There may be other transmutations 
 possible besides those of phosphorus and sulphur, 
 When Dr. Prout, in 1840, talked about azote and car- 
 bon being "formed" in the living system, it was 
 
12 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 looked upon as one of those freaks of fancy to which 
 philosophers, like other men, are subject. But when 
 Professor Faraday, in 1851, says, at a meeting of the 
 British Association, that " his hopes are in the direc- 
 tion of proving that bodies called simple were really 
 compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as 
 we are masters of the laws influencing their combina- 
 tions," — when he comes forward and says that he has 
 tried experiments at transmutation, and means, if his 
 life is spared, to try them again, — how can we be sur- 
 prised at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napo- 
 leon has established a gold-factory and is glutting the 
 mints of Europe with bullion of his own making ? 
 
 And so with reference to the law of combinations. 
 The old maxim was, Corpora non agunt nisi soluta. If 
 two substances, a and b, are enclosed in a glass vessel, c, 
 we do not expect the glass to change them, unless a 
 or b or the compound a b has the power of dissolving 
 the glass. But if for a I take oxygen, for b hydrogen, 
 and for c & piece of spongy platinum, I find the first 
 two combine with the common signs of combustion 
 and form water, the third in the mean time under- 
 going no perceptible change. It has played the part 
 of the unwedded priest, who marries a pair without 
 taking a fee or having any further relation with the 
 parties. We call this catalysis, catalytic action, the ac- 
 tion of presence, or by what learned name we choose. 
 Give what name to it we will, it is a manifestation of 
 power which crosses our established laws of combina- 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 13 
 
 tion at a very open angle of intersection. I think we 
 may find an analogy for it in electrical induction, the 
 disturbance of the equilibrium of the electricity of a 
 body by the approach of a charged body to it, without 
 interchange of electrical conditions between the two 
 bodies. But an analogy is not an explanation, and 
 why a few drops of yeast should change a saccharine 
 
 ' mixture to carbonic acid and alcohol, — a little leaven 
 leavening the whole lump, — not by combining with it, 
 but by setting a movement at work, we not only can- 
 not explain, but the fact is such an exception to the 
 recognized laws of combination, that Liebig is unwilling 
 to admit the new force at all to which Berzelius had 
 given the name so generally accepted. 
 
 The phenomena of isomerism, or identity of compo- 
 sition and proportions of constituents with difference 
 
 / of qualities, and of isomorphism, or identity of form in 
 crystals which have one element substituted for another, 
 were equally surprises to science ; and although the 
 mechanism by which they are brought about can be 
 to a certain extent explained by a reference to the 
 hypothetical atoms of which the elements are consti- 
 tuted, yet this is only turning the difficulty into a frac- 
 tion with an infinitesimal denominator and an infinite 
 numerator. 
 
 So far we have studied the working of force and 
 its seeming anomalies in purely chemical phenomena. 
 But we soon find that chemical force is developed by 
 various other physical agencies, — by heat, by light, by 
 
14 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 electricity, by magnetism, by mechanical agencies ; 
 and, vice versa, that chemical action develops heat, 
 light, electricity, magnetism, mechanical force, as we 
 see in our matches, galvanic batteries, and explosive 
 compounds. Proceeding with our experiments, we 
 find that every kind of force is capable of producing 
 all other kinds, or, in Mr. Faraday's language, that 
 " the. various forms under which the forces of matter 
 are made manifest have a common origin, or, in other 
 words, are so directly related and mutually dependent 
 that they are convertible one into another." 
 
 Out of this doctrine naturally springs that of the 
 conservation of force, so ably illustrated by Mr. Grove, 
 Dr. Carpenter, and Mr. Faraday. This idea is no 
 novelty, though it seems so at first sight. It was 
 maintained and disputed among the giants of philos- 
 ophy. Des Cartes and Leibnitz denied that any new 
 motion originated in nature, or that any ever ceased 
 to exist ; all motion being in a circle, passing from 
 one body to another, one losing what the other gained. 
 Newton, on the other hand, believed that new motions 
 were generated and existing ones destroyed. On the 
 first supposition, there is a fixed amount of force al- 
 ways circulating in the universe. On the second, the 
 total amount may be v increasing or diminishing. You 
 will find in the Annual of Scientific Discovery for 
 1858 a very interesting lecture by Professor Helm- 
 holtz of Bonn, in which it is maintained that a cer- 
 tain portion of force is lost in every natural process, 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 15 
 
 being converted into unchangeable heat, so that the 
 universe will come to a stand-still at last, all force pass- 
 ing into heat, and all heat into a state of equilibrium. 
 
 The doctrines of the convertibility or specific equiv- 
 alence of the various forms of force, and of its conser- 
 vation, which is its logical consequence, are very gen- 
 erally accepted, as I believe, at the present time, 
 among physicists. We are naturally led to the ques- 
 tion, What is the nature of force ? The three illus- 
 trious philosophers just referred to agree in attributing 
 the general movements of the universe to the imme- 
 diate Divine action.* The doctrine of " pre-established 
 harmony'' was an especial contrivance of Leibnitz to 
 remove the Creator from unworthy association with 
 the less divine acts of living beings. Obsolete as this 
 expression sounds to our ears, the phrase laws of the 
 universe, which we use so contantly with a wider ap- 
 plication, appears to me essentially identical with it. 
 
 Force does not admit of explanation, nor of proper 
 
 * " Et generalem quod attinet, manifestum mihi videtur illam [causam] 
 non aliam esse, quam Deum ipsum, qui materiam simul cum motu et 
 quiete in principio creavit, jamque per solum suum concursum ordinarium, 
 tantundem motus et quietis in ea tota quantum tunc posuit conservat: .... 
 eodem plane modo, eademque ratione qua prius creavit, eum etiam tantun- 
 dem motus in ipsa semper conservare." — Des Cartes, Princ. Phil., P. II. 
 § XXXVI. 
 
 " Concursus Dei, actioni creaturse necessarius." — Leibnitz, Op., Tom. 
 VI. p. 174. 
 
 " In ipso continentur et moventur universa, sed absque mutua passione. 
 Deus nihil patitur ex corporum motibus : ilia nullam sentiunt resistentiam 
 ex omniprgesentia Dei." — Newton, Principia, Lib. III. Schol. Gen. 
 
/ 
 
 16 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 definition, any more than the hypothetical substratum 
 of matter. If we assume the Infinite as omnipresent, 
 omniscient, omnipotent, we cannot suppose Him ex- 
 cluded from any part of His creation, except from 
 rebellious souls which voluntarily exclude Him by 
 the exercise of their fatal prerogative of free-will.* 
 Force, then, is the act of immanent Divinity. I find 
 no meaning in mechanical explanations. Newton's hy- 
 pothesis of an ether filling the heavenly spaces does 
 not, I confess, help my conceptions. I will, and the 
 muscles of my vocal organs shape my speech. God 
 wills, and the universe articulates His power, wisdom, 
 and goodness. That is all I know. There is no bridge 
 my mind can throw from the "immaterial" cause to 
 the "material" effect. 
 
 The problem of force meets us everywhere, and I 
 prefer to encounter it in the world of physical phenom- 
 ena before reaching that of living actions. It is#only 
 the name for the incomprehensible cause of certain 
 changes known to our consciousness, and assumed to be 
 outside of it. For me it is the Deity Himself in action. 
 
 I can therefore see a large significance in the some- 
 
 * M Cum unaquaeque spatii particula sit semper, et unumquodque duratio- 
 nis indivisibile momentum ubique; certe rerum omnium Fabricator ac 
 Dominus non erit nunquam nusquam. Omniprsesens est non per virtutem 
 solam, sed etiam per substantiam ; nam virtus sine substantia subsistere 
 non potest." — Newton, loc. cit. 
 
 " The Lord of all, himself through all diffused, 
 Sustains and is the life of all that lives." 
 
 The Task, B. VI. 1. 221, 222. 
 
/ 
 
 IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 17 
 
 what bold language of Burdach : " There is for me 
 but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one 
 mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from 
 the infinite. So soon as we recognize this incompre- 
 hensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of 
 which our reason perceives the necessity, but the man- 
 ner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as 
 we contemplate the nature known to us by experience, 
 in this light, there is for us no other impenetrable mir- 
 acle or mystery." * 
 
 Let us turn to a branch of knowledge which deals 
 with certainties up to the limit of the senses, and is 
 involved in no speculations beyond them. In certain 
 points of view, Human Anatomy may be considered 
 an almost exhausted science. From time to time some 
 small organ which had escaped earlier observers has 
 been pointed out, — such parts as the tensor tarsi, the 
 otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some of 
 our best anatomical works are those which have been 
 classic for many generations. The plates of the bones 
 in Vesalius, three centuries old, are still masterpieces 
 of accuracy, as of art. The magnificent work of Albi- 
 nus on the muscles, published in 1747, is still supreme 
 in its department, as the constant references of the 
 most thorough recent treatise on the subject, that of 
 Theile, sufficiently show. More has been done in 
 unravelling the mysteries of the fasciae, but there has 
 
 * Physiologie, Trad, de Jourdan, II. 326. 
 
18 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 been a tendency to overdo this kind of material analy- 
 sis. Alexander Thomson split them up into cobwebs, 
 as you may see in the plates to Velpeau's Surgical 
 Anatomy. I well remember how he used to shake 
 his head over the coarse work of Scarpa and Astley 
 Cooper, — as if Denner, who painted the separate hairs 
 of the beard and pores of the skin in his portraits, had 
 spoken lightly of the pictures of Rubens and Vandyk. 
 
 Not only has little been added to the catalogue of 
 parts, but some things long known had become half- 
 forgotten. Louis and others confounded the solitary 
 glands of the lower part of the small intestine with 
 those which " the great Brunner," as Haller calls him, 
 described in 1687 as being found in the duodenum. 
 The display of the fibrous structure of the brain seemed 
 a novelty as shown by Spurzheim. One is startled to 
 find the method anticipated by Raymond Vieussens 
 nearly two centuries ago. I can hardly think Gordon 
 had ever looked at his figures, though he names their 
 author, when he wrote the captious and sneering arti- 
 cle which attracted so much attention in the pages of 
 the Edinburgh Review.* 
 
 This is the place, if anywhere, to mention any ob- 
 servations I could pretend to have made in the course 
 of my teaching the structure of the human body. I 
 can make no better show than most of my predecessors 
 in this well-reaped field. The nucleated cells found 
 connected with the cancellated structure of the bones, 
 
 * June, 1815. 
 
W MEDICAL SCIENCE. 19 
 
 which I first pointed out and had figured in 1847, and 
 have shown yearly from that time to the present, and 
 the fossa rnasseterica, a shallow concavity on the ramus 
 of the lower jaw, for the lodgement of the masseter 
 muscle, which acquires significance when examined by 
 the side of the deep cavity on the corresponding part 
 in some carnivora to which it answers, may perhaps be 
 claimed as deserving attention. I have also pleased 
 myself by making a special group of the six radiating 
 muscles * which diverge from the spine of the axis, or 
 second cervical vertebra, and by giving to it the name 
 Stella musculosa nuchce. But this scanty catalogue is 
 only an evidence that one may teach long and see little 
 that has not been noted by those who have gone before 
 him. Of course I do not think it necessary to include 
 rare, but already described anomalies, such as the epi- 
 sternal bones, the rectus sternalis, and other interesting 
 exceptional formations I have encountered, which have 
 shown a curious tendency to present themselves sev- 
 eral times in the same season, perhaps because the 
 first specimen found calls our attention to any we may 
 subsequently meet with. 
 
 The anatomy of the scalpel and the amphitheatre 
 was, then, becoming an exhausted branch of investiga- 
 tion. But during the present century the study of the 
 human body has changed its old aspect, and become 
 fertile in new observations. This rejuvenescence was 
 
 * Rectus capitis posticus major, obliquus capitis inferior, and semispinalis 
 colli, on each side. 
 
20 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 effected by means of two principal agencies, — new 
 methods and a new instrument. 
 
 Descriptive anatomy, as known from an early date, 
 is to the body what geography is to the planet. Now 
 geography was pretty well known so long ago as when 
 Arrowsmith, who was born in 1750, published his ad- 
 mirable maps. But in that same year was born Wer- 
 ner, who taught a new way of studying the earth, 
 since become familiar to us all under the name of 
 Geology. 
 
 What geology has done for our knowledge of the 
 earth, has been done for our knowledge of the body by 
 that method of study to which is given the name of 
 General Anatomy. It studies, not the organs as such, 
 but the elements out of which the organs are con- 
 structed. It is the geology of the body, as that is the 
 general anatomy of the earth. The extraordinary 
 genius of Bichat, to whom more than any other we 
 owe this new method of study, does not require Mr. 
 Buckle's testimony to impress the practitioner with 
 the importance of its achievements. I have heard a 
 very wise physician question whether any important 
 result had accrued to practical medicine from Harvey's 
 discovery of the circulation. But Anatomy, Physiol- 
 ogy, and Pathology have received a new light from 
 this novel method of contemplating the living struc- 
 tures, which has had a vast influence in enabling the 
 practitioner at least to distinguish and predict the 
 course of disease. We know as well what differences 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 21 
 
 to expect in the habits of a mucous and of a serous 
 membrane, as what mineral substances to look for in 
 the chalk or the coal measures. You have only to 
 read Cullen's description of inflammation of the lungs 
 or of the bowels, and compare it with such as you may 
 find in Laennec or Watson, to see the immense gain 
 which diagnosis and prognosis have derived from gen- 
 eral anatomy. 
 
 The second new method of studying the human 
 structure, beginning with the labors of Scarpa, Burns, 
 and Colles, grew up principally during the first third 
 of this century. It does not deal with organs, as 
 did the earlier anatomists, nor with tissues, after the 
 manner of Bichat. It maps the whole surface of the 
 body into an arbitrary number of regions, and studies 
 each region successively from the surface to the bone, 
 or beneath it. This hardly deserves the name of a sci- 
 ence, although Velpeau has dignified it with that title, 
 but it furnishes an admirable practical way for the sur- 
 geon who has to operate on a particular region of the 
 body to study that region. If we are buying a farm, 
 we are not content with the State map or a geological 
 chart including the estate in question. We demand 
 an exact survey of that particular property, so that we 
 may know what we are dealing with. This is just 
 what regional, or, as it is sometimes called, surgical 
 anatomy, does for the surgeon with reference to the 
 part on which his skill is to be exercised. It enables 
 him to see with the mind's eye through the opaque tis- 
 
22 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 sues down to the bone on which they he, as if the skin 
 were transparent as the cornea, and the organs it cov- 
 ers translucent as the gelatinous pulp of a medusa. 
 
 It is curious that the Japanese should have antici- 
 pated Europe in a kind of rude regional anatomy. I 
 have seen a manikin of Japanese make traced all over 
 with lines, and points marking their intersection. By 
 this their doctors are guided in the performance of acu- 
 puncture, marking the safe places to thrust in needles, 
 as we buoy out our ship-channels, and doubtless indi- 
 cating to learned eyes the spots where incautious med- 
 dling had led to those little accidents of shipwreck to 
 which patients are unfortunately liable. 
 
 A change of method, then, has given us General 
 and Regional Anatomy. These, too, have been 
 worked so thoroughly, that, if not exhausted, they 
 have at least become to a great extent fixed and pos- 
 itive branches of knowledge. But the first of them, 
 General Anatomy, would never have reached this 
 positive condition but for the introduction of that in- 
 strument which I have mentioned as the second great 
 aid to modern progress. 
 
 This instrument is the achromatic microscope. For 
 the history of the successive steps by which it became 
 the effective scientific implement we now possess, I 
 must refer you to the work of Mr. Quekett, to an 
 excellent article in the Penny Cyclopaedia, or to that 
 of Sir David Brewster in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
 It is a most interesting piece of scientific history, which 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 23 
 
 shows how the problem that Biot in 1821 pronounced 
 insolvable was in the course of a few years practically 
 solved, with a success equal to that which Dollond had 
 long before obtained with the telescope. It is enough 
 for our purpose that we are now in possession of an 
 instrument freed from all confusions and illusions, 
 
 / which magnifies a thousand diameters, — a million 
 times in surface, — without serious distortion or dis- 
 coloration of its object. 
 
 A quarter of a century ago, or a little more, an 
 instructor would not have hesitated to put John Bell's 
 Anatomy and Bostock's Physiology into a student's 
 hands, as good authority on their respective subjects. 
 Let us not be unjust to either of these authors. John 
 
 I Bell is the liveliest medical writer that I can remember 
 who has written since the days of delightful old Am- 
 broise Pare*. His picturesque descriptions and bold 
 figures are as good now as they ever were, and his 
 book can never become obsolete. But listen to what 
 John Bell says of the microscope : — 
 
 " Philosophers of the last age had been at infinite 
 pains to find the ultimate fibre of muscles, thinking to 
 discover its properties in its form ; but they saw just 
 in proportion to the glasses which they used, or to their 
 practice and skill in that art, which is now almost for- 
 saken." * 
 
 n 
 
 Dr. Bostock's work, neglected as it is, is one which 
 I value very highly as a really learned compilation, full 
 
 * Anat. and Phys. of the Human Body, I. 273. 
 
24 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 of original references. But Dr. Bostock says : " Much 
 as the naturalist has been indebted to the microscope, 
 by bringing into view many beings of which he could 
 not otherwise have ascertained the existence, the physi- 
 ologist has not yet derived any great benefit from the 
 instrument." * 
 
 These are only specimens of the manner in which 
 the microscope and its results were generally regarded 
 by the generation just preceding our own. 
 
 I have referred you to the proper authorities for the 
 account of those improvements which about the year 
 1830 rendered the compound microscope an efficient 
 and trustworthy instrument. It was now for the first 
 time that a true general anatomy became possible. As 
 early as 1816 Treviranus had attempted to resolve the 
 tissues, of which Bichat had admitted no less than 
 twenty-one, into their simple microscopic elements. 
 How could such an attempt succeed, Henle well 
 asks,f at a time when the most extensively diffused 
 of all the tissues, the areolar, was not at all under- 
 stood ? All that method could do had been accom- 
 plished by Bichat and his followers. It was for the 
 optician to take the next step. The future of anatomy 
 and physiology, as an enthusiastic micrologist of the 
 time said, was in the hands of Messrs. Schieck and 
 Pistor, famous opticians of Berlin. 
 
 In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all 
 
 * Physiology, p. 281. 
 
 f Anatomie Generate, (Trad, de Jourdan,) I. 125. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 25 
 
 the points of minute anatomy were involved in obscu- 
 rity. Some found globules everywhere, some fibres. 
 Students disputed whether the conjunctiva extended 
 over the cornea or not, and worried themselves over 
 Gaultier de Claubry's stratified layers of the skin, or 
 Breschet's blennogenous and chromatogenous organs. 
 The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal a 
 myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the 
 golden fleece. The structure of bone, now so beauti- 
 fully made out, — even that of the teeth, in which 
 old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes 
 through the minute lenses wrought with his own hands, 
 had long ago seen the " pipes," as he called them, — 
 was hardly known at all. The minute structure of the 
 viscera lay in the mists of an uncertain microscopic 
 vision. The intimate recesses of the animal system 
 were to the students of anatomy what the interior of 
 Africa long was to geographers, and the stories of 
 microscopic explorers were as much sneered at as those 
 of Bruce or Du Chaillu, and with better reason. 
 
 Now what have we come to in our own day ? In 
 the first place, the minute structure of all the organs 
 has been made out in the most satisfactory way. The 
 special arrangements of the vessels and the ducts of all 
 the glands, of the air- tubes and vesicles of the lungs, 
 of the parts which make up the skin and other mem- 
 branes, all the details of those complex parenchymatous 
 organs which had confounded investigation so long, 
 have been lifted out of the invisible into the sight of all 
 2 
 
26 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 observers. It is fair to mention here, that we owe a 
 great deal to the art of minute injection, by which we 
 are enabled to trace the smallest vessels in the midst 
 of the tissues where they are distributed. This is an 
 old artifice of anatomists. The famous Ruysch, who 
 died a hundred and thirty years ago, showed that each 
 of the viscera has its terminal vessels arranged in its 
 own peculiar way ; * the same fact which you may see 
 illustrated in Gerber's figures after the minute injec- 
 tions of Berres.f I hope to show you many specimens 
 of this kind in the microscope, the work of English and 
 American hands. Professor Agassiz allows me also to 
 make use of a very rich collection of injected prepara- 
 tions sent him by Professor Hyrtl, formerly of Prague, 
 now of Vienna, for the proper exhibition of which I 
 had a number of microscopes made expressly, by Mr. 
 Grunow, during the past season. All this illustrates 
 what has been done for the elucidation of the intimate 
 details of formation of the organs. 
 
 But the great triumph of the microscope as applied 
 to anatomy has been in the resolution of the organs 
 and the tissues into their simple constituent anatomical 
 elements. It has taken up general anatomy where 
 Bichat left it. He had succeeded in reducing the 
 structural language of nature to syllables, if you will 
 permit me to use so bold an image. The microscopic 
 observers who have come after him have analyzed these 
 
 * Haller, Bibl. Anat., I. 633. 
 
 t General and Minute Anatomy, (London, 1842,) Plate XXIIL 
 
EN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 27 
 
 into letters, as we may call them, — the simple elements 
 by the combination of which Nature spells out succes- 
 sively tissues, which are her syllables, organs which 
 are her words, systems which are her chapters, and 
 so goes on from the simple to the complex, until she 
 binds up in one living whole that wondrous volume of 
 power and wisdom which we call the human body. 
 
 The alphabet of the organization is so short and 
 simple, that I will risk fatiguing your attention by re- 
 peating it, according to the plan I have long adopted. 
 
 A. Cells, either floating, as in the blood, or fixed, 
 like those in the cancellated structure of bone, already 
 referred to. Very commonly they have undergone a 
 change of figure, most frequently a flattening which 
 reduces them to scales, as in the epidermis and the 
 epithelium. 
 
 B. Simple, translucent, homogeneous solid, such 
 as is found at the back of the cornea, or forming the 
 intercellular substance of cartilage. 
 
 C. The white fibrous element, consisting of very 
 delicate, tenacious threads. This is the long-staple 
 textile substance of the body. It is to the organism 
 what cotton is pretended to be to our Southern States. 
 It pervades the whole animal fabric as areolar tissue, 
 which is the universal packing and wrapping material. 
 It forms the ligaments which bind the whole frame- 
 work together. It furnishes the sinews, which are the 
 channels of power. It enfolds every muscle. It wraps 
 the brain in its hard, insensible folds, and the heart 
 itself beats in a purse that is made of it. 
 
28 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 D. The yellow elastic, fibrous element, the caout- 
 chouc of the animal mechanism, which pulls things 
 back into place, as the india-rubber band shuts the 
 door we have opened. 
 
 E. The striped muscular fibre, — the red flesh, 
 which shortens itself in obedience to the will, and thus 
 produces all voluntary active motion. 
 
 F. The unstriped muscular fibre, more properly 
 the fusiform-cell fibre, which carries on the involun- 
 tary internal movements. 
 
 G. The nerve-cylinder, a glassy tube, with a pith 
 of some firmness, which conveys sensation to the brain 
 and the principle which induces motion from it. 
 
 H. The nerve-corpuscle, the centre of nervous 
 power. 
 
 I. The mucous tissue, as Virchow calls it, common 
 in embryonic structures, seen in the vitreous humor of 
 the adult. 
 
 To these add X, granules, of indeterminate shape 
 and size, Y, for inorganic matters, such as the salts of 
 bone and teeth, and Z, to stand as a symbol of the 
 fluids, and you have the letters of what I have ven- 
 tured to call the alphabet of the body. 
 
 But just as in language certain diphthongs and syl- 
 lables are frequently recurring, so we have in the body 
 certain secondary and tertiary combinations, which we 
 meet more frequently than the solitary elements of 
 which they are composed. 
 
 Thus A B, or a collection of cells united by simple 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 29 
 
 structureless solid, is seen to be extensively employed 
 in the body under the name of cartilage. Out of this 
 the surfaces of the articulations and the springs of the 
 breathing apparatus are formed. But when Nature 
 came to the buffers of the spinal column (interverte- 
 bral disks) and the washers of the joints (semilunar 
 fibro-cartilages of the knee, etc.), she required more 
 tenacity than common cartilage possessed. What did 
 she do ? What does man do in a similar case of need ? 
 I need hardly tell you. The mason lays his bricks in 
 simple mortar. But the plasterer works some hair into 
 the mortar which he is going to lay in large sheets on 
 the walls. The children of Israel complained that 
 they had no straw to make their bricks with, though 
 portions of it may still be seen in the crumbling pyra- 
 mid of Darshour, which they are said to have built. 
 I visited the old house on Witch Hill in Salem a year 
 or two ago, and there I found the walls coated with 
 clay in which straw was abundantly mingled; — the 
 old Judaizing witch-hangers copied the Israelites in a 
 good many things. The Chinese and the Corsicans 
 blend the fibres of amianthus in their pottery to give 
 it tenacity. Now to return to Nature. To make her 
 buffers and washers hold together in the shocks to 
 which they would be subjected, she took common car- 
 tilage and mingled the white fibrous tissue with it, to 
 serve the same purpose as the hair in the mortar, the 
 straw in the bricks and in the plaster of the old wall, 
 and the amianthus in the earthen vessels. Thus we 
 
30 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 have the combination ABC, or fibro-cartilage. Again, 
 the bones were once only gristle or cartilage, A B. 
 To give them solidity they were infiltrated with stone, 
 in the form of salts of lime, an inorganic element, so 
 that bone would be spelt out by the letters A, B, and Y. 
 If from these organic syllables we proceed to form 
 organic words, we shall find that Nature employs 
 three principal forms ; namely, Vessels, Membranes, 
 and Parenchyma, or visceral tissue. The most com- 
 plex of them can be resolved into a combination of 
 these few simple anatomical constituents. 
 
 Passing for a moment into the domain of Pathologi- 
 cal Anatomy, we find the same elements in morbid 
 growths that we have met with in normal structures. 
 The pus-corpuscle and the white blood-corpuscle can 
 only be distinguished by tracing them to their origin. 
 A frequent form of so-called malignant disease proves 
 to be only a collection of altered epithelium-cells. 
 Even cancer itself has no specific anatomical ele- 
 ment, and the diagnosis of a cancerous tumor by the 
 microscope, though tolerably sure under the eye of 
 an expert, is based upon accidental, and not essential 
 points, — the crowding together of the elements, the 
 size of the cell-nuclei, and similar variable characters. 
 
 Let us turn to Physiology. The microscope, which 
 has made a new science of the intimate structure of 
 the organs, has at the same time cleared up many 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 31 
 
 uncertainties concerning the mechanism of the special 
 functions. Up -to the time of the living generation of 
 observers, Nature had kept over all her inner work- 
 shops the forbidding inscription, No Admittance! If 
 any prying observer ventured to spy through his mag- 
 nifying tubes into the mysteries of her glands and 
 canals and fluids, she covered up her work in blinding 
 mists and bewildering halos, as the deities of old con- 
 cealed their favored heroes in the moment of danger. 
 Science has at length sifted the turbid light of her 
 lenses, and blanched their delusive rainbows. 
 
 Anatomy studies the organism in space. Physiol- 
 ogy studies it also in time. After the study of form 
 and composition follows close that of action, and this 
 leads us along back to the first moment of the germ, 
 and forward to the resolution of the living frame into 
 its lifeless elements. In this way Anatomy, or rather 
 that branch of it which we call Histology, has become 
 inseparably blended with the study of function. The 
 connection between the science of life and that of in- 
 timate structure on the one hand, and composition on 
 the other, is illustrated in the titles of two recent works 
 of remarkable excellence, — the Physiological Anato- 
 my of Todd and Bowman, and the Physiological 
 Chemistry of Lehmann. 
 
 Let me briefly recapitulate a few of our acquisitions 
 in Physiology, due in large measure to our new instru- 
 ments and methods of research, and at the same time 
 indicate the limits which form the permanent or the 
 
32 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 temporary boundaries of our knowledge. I will begin 
 with the largest fact and with the most absolute and 
 universally encountered limitation. 
 
 The " largest truth in Physiology " Mr. Paget con- 
 siders to be " the development of ova through multi- 
 plication and division of their cells." I would state 
 it more broadly as the agency of the cell in all living 
 processes. It seems at present necessary to abandon 
 the original idea of Schwann, that we can observe the 
 building up of a cell from the simple granules of a 
 blastema, or formative fluid. The evidence points 
 rather towards the axiom, Omnis cellula e cellula ; 
 that is, the germ of a new cell is always derived from 
 a pre-existing cell. The doctrine of Schwann, as I re- 
 marked long ago (1844), runs parallel with the nebu- 
 lar theory in astronomy, and they may yet stand or fall 
 together. 
 
 As we have seen Nature anticipating the plasterer 
 in fibro-cartilage, so we see her beforehand with the 
 glass-blower in her dealings with the cell. The artisan 
 blows his vitreous bubbles, large or small, to be used 
 afterwards as may be wanted. So Nature shapes her 
 hyaline vesicles and modifies them to serve the needs 
 of the part where they are found. The artisan whirls 
 his rod, and his glass bubble becomes a flattened disk, 
 with its bull's-eye for a nucleus. These lips of ours 
 are all glazed with microscopic tiles formed of flattened 
 cells, each one of them with its nucleus still as plain 
 and relatively as prominent, to the eye of the micro- 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 33 
 
 scopist, as the bull's-eye in the old-fashioned window- 
 pane. Everywhere we find cells, modified or un- 
 changed. They roll in inconceivable multitudes (five 
 millions and more to the cubic millimetre, according 
 to Vierordt*) as blood-disks through our vessels. A 
 close-fitting mail of flattened cells coats our surface 
 with a panoply of imbricated scales, (more than twelve 
 thousand millions, as Harting has computed,!) as true 
 a defence against our enemies as the buckler of the 
 armadillo or the carapace of the tortoise against theirs. 
 The same little protecting organs pave all the great 
 highways of the interior system. Cells, again, preside 
 over the chemical processes which elaborate the living 
 fluids ; they change their form to become the agents of 
 voluntary and involuntary motion ; the soul itself sits 
 on a throne of nucleated cells, and flashes its mandates 
 through skeins of glassy filaments which once were 
 simple chains of vesicles. And, as if to reduce the 
 problem of living force to its simplest expression, we 
 see the yolk of a transparent egg dividing itself in whole 
 or in part, and again dividing and subdividing, until it 
 becomes a mass of cells, out of which the harmonious 
 diversity of the organs arranges itself, worm or man, as 
 God has willed from the beginning. 
 
 This differentiation having been effected, each sev- 
 eral part assumes its special office, having a life of its 
 own, adjusted to that of other parts and the whole. 
 
 * Kolliker, Manual, etc., (London, I860,) p. 518. 
 t Valentin's Physiology, (Brinton's Transl.,) p. 13. 
 
 2* c 
 
34 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 " Just as a tree constitutes a mass arranged in a definite 
 manner, in which, in every single part, in the leaves 
 as in the root, in the trunk as in the blossom, cells are 
 discovered to be the ultimate elements, so is it also with 
 the forms of animal life. Every animal presents itself 
 as a sum of vital unities, every one of which manifests 
 all the characteristics of life."* 
 
 The mechanism is as clear, as unquestionable, as ab- 
 solutely settled and universally accepted, as the order 
 of movement of the heavenly bodies, which we com- 
 pute backward to the days of the observatories on the 
 plains of Shinar, and on the faith of which we regulate 
 the movements of war and trade by the predictious of 
 our ephemeris. 
 
 The mechanism, and that is all. We see the work- 
 man and the tools, but the skill that guides the work 
 and the power that performs it are as invisible as ever. 
 I fear that not every listener took the significance of 
 those pregnant words in the passage I quoted from 
 John Bell, — a thinking to discover its jproperties in its 
 form" We have discovered the working bee in this 
 great hive of organization. We have detected the cell 
 in the very act of forming itself from a nucleus, of 
 transforming itself into various tissues, of selecting the 
 elements of various secretions. But why one cell be- 
 comes nerve and another muscle, why one selects bile 
 and another fat, we can no more pretend to tell, than 
 why one grape sucks out of the soil the generous juice 
 
 * Virchow, Cellular Pathology, Lect. I. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 35 
 
 which princes hoard in their cellars, and another the 
 wine which it takes three men to drink, — one to pour 
 it down, another to swallow it, and a third to hold him 
 while it is going down. Certain analogies between this 
 selecting power and the phenomena of endosmosis in 
 the elective affinities of chemistry we can find, but the 
 problem of foroe remains here, as everywhere, unsolved 
 and insolvable. 
 
 Do we gain anything by attempting to get rid of the 
 idea of a special vital force because we find certain 
 mutually convertible relations between forces in the 
 body and out of it ? I think not, any more than we 
 should gain by getting rid of the idea and expression 
 Magnetism because of its correlation with electricity. 
 We may concede the unity of all forms of force, but 
 we cannot overlook the fixed differences of its manifes- 
 tations according to the conditions under which it acts. 
 It is a mistake, however, to think the mystery is greater 
 in an organized body than in any other. We see a 
 stone fall or a crystal form, and there is nothing stran- 
 ger left to wonder at, for we have seen the Infinite in 
 action. 
 
 Just so far as we can recognize the ordinary modes 
 of operation of the common forces of nature, — gravity, 
 cohesion, elasticity, transudation, chemical action, and 
 the rest, — we see the so-called vital acts in the light of 
 a larger range of known facts and familiar analogies. 
 Matteucci's well-remembered lectures contain many 
 and striking examples of the working of physical forces 
 
36 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 in physiological processes. Wherever rigid experiment 
 carries us, we are safe in following this lead ; but the 
 moment we begin to theorize beyond our strict observa- 
 tion, we are in danger of falling into those mechanical 
 follies which true science has long outgrown. 
 
 Recognizing the fact, then, that we have learned 
 nothing but the machinery of life, and are no nearer 
 to its essence, what is it that we have gained by this 
 great discovery of the cell formation and function ? 
 
 It would have been reward enough to learn the 
 method Nature pursues for its own sake. If the sov- 
 ereign Artificer lets us into his own laboratories and 
 workshops, we need not ask more than the privilege 
 of looking on at his work. We do not know where 
 we now stand in the hierarchy of created intelligences. 
 We were made a little lower than the angels. I speak 
 it not irreverently ; as the lower animals surpass man 
 in some of their attributes, so it may be that not every 
 angel's eye can see as broadly and as deeply into the 
 material works of God as man himself, looking at the 
 firmament through an equatorial of fifteen inches' aper- 
 ture, and searching into the tissues with a twelfth 
 of an inch objective. 
 
 But there are other positive gains of a more practi- 
 cal character. Thus we are no longer permitted to 
 place the seat of the living actions in the extreme ves- 
 sels, which are only the carriers from which each part 
 takes what it wants by the divine right of the omnipo- 
 tent nucleated cell. The organism has become, in the 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 37 
 
 words already borrowed from Virchow, " a sum of vital 
 unities." The strictum and laxum, the increased and 
 diminished action of the vessels, out of which medical 
 theories and methods of treatment have grown up, have 
 yielded to the doctrine of local cell-communities, be- 
 longing to this or that vascular district, from which 
 they help themselves, as contractors are wont to do 
 from the national treasury. 
 
 I cannot promise to do more than to select a few of 
 the points of contact between our ignorance and our 
 knowledge which present particular interest in the ex- 
 isting state of physiological knowledge. Some of them 
 involve the microscopic discoveries of which I have 
 been speaking, some belong to the domain of chemistry, 
 and some have relations with other departments of 
 physical science. 
 
 If we should begin with the digestive function, we 
 should find that the long-agitated question of the nature 
 of the acid of the gastric juice is becoming settled in 
 favor of the lactic. But the whole solvent agency of 
 the digestive fluid enters into the category of that ex- 
 ceptional mode of action already familiar to us in 
 chemistry as catalysis. It is therefore doubly difficult 
 of explanation ; first, as being, like all reactions, a fact 
 not to be accounted for except by the imaginative ap- 
 peal to " affinity," and secondly, as being one of those 
 peculiar reactions provoked by an element which stands 
 outside and looks on without compromising itself. 
 
 The doctrine of Mulder, so widely diffused in popu- 
 
38 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 lar and scientific belief, of the existence of a common 
 base of all albuminous substances, the so-called protein, 
 has not stood the test of rigorous analysis. The divis- 
 ion of food into azotized and non-azotized is no doubt 
 important, but the attempt to show that the first only 
 is plastic or nutritive, while the second is simply calori- 
 facient, or heat-producing, fails entirely in the face of 
 the facts revealed by the study of man in different cli- 
 mates, and of numerous experiments in the feeding of 
 animals. I must return to this subject in connection 
 with the respiratory function. 
 
 The sugar-making faculty of the liver is another 
 " catalytic " mystery, as great as the rest of them, and 
 no greater. Liver-tissue brings sugar out of the blood, 
 or out of its own substance ; — why ? 
 
 Quia est in eo 
 Virtus saccharitiva. 
 
 Just what becomes of the sugar beyond the fact of its 
 disappearance before it can get into the general circula- 
 tion and sweeten our tempers, it is hard to say. 
 
 The pancreatic fluid makes an emulsion of the fat 
 contained in our food, but just how the fatty particles 
 get into the villi we must leave Briicke and Kolliker to 
 settle if they can. 
 
 No one has shown satisfactorily the process by which 
 the blood-corpuscles are formed out of the lymph-cor- 
 puscles, nor what becomes of them. These two ques- 
 tions are like those famous household puzzles, — Where 
 do the flies come from ? and, Where do the pins go to ? 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 39 
 
 There is a series of organs in the body which has 
 long puzzled physiologists, — organs of glandular aspect, 
 but having no ducts, — the spleen, the thyroid and 
 thymus bodies, and the suprarenal capsules. We call 
 them vascular glands, and we believe that they elabo- 
 rate colored and uncolored blood-cells ; but just what 
 changes they effect, and just how they effect them, it 
 has proved a very difficult matter to determine. So of 
 the noted glandules which form Peyer's patches, their 
 precise office, though seemingly like those of the lym- 
 phatic glands, cannot be positively assigned, so far as I 
 know, at the present time. It is of obvious interest to 
 learn it with reference to the pathology of typhoid fever. 
 It will be remarked that the coincidence of their changes 
 in this disease with enlargement of the spleen suggests 
 the idea of a similarity of function in these two organs. 
 
 The theories of the production of animal heat, from 
 the times of Black, Lavoisier, and Crawford to those 
 of Liebig, are familiar to all who have paid any atten- 
 tion to physiological studies. The simplicity of Liebig's 
 views, and the popular form in which they have been 
 presented, have given them wide currency, and incorpo- 
 rated them in the common belief and language of our 
 text-books. Direct oxidation or combustion of the 
 carbon and hydrogen contained in the food, or in the 
 tissues themselves ; the division of alimentary sub- 
 stances into respiratory, or non-azotized, and azotized, — 
 these doctrines are familiar even to the classes in our 
 high-schools. But this simple statement is boldly ques- 
 
40 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 tioned. Nothing proves that oxygen combines (in the 
 system) with hydrogen and carbon in particular, rather 
 than with sulphur and azote. Such is the well-grounded 
 statement of Robin and Verdeil. " It is very probable 
 that animal heat is entirely produced by the chemical 
 actions which take place in the organism^ but the phe- 
 nomenon is too complex to admit of our calculating it 
 according to the quality of oxygen consumed." These 
 last are the words of Regnault, as cited by Mr. Lewes, 
 whose intelligent discussion of this and many of the 
 most interesting physiological problems I strongly rec- 
 ommend to your attention. 
 
 This single illustration covers a wider ground than 
 the special function to which it belongs. We are learn- 
 ing that the chemistry of the body must be studied, not 
 simply by its ingesta and egesta, but that there is a 
 long intermediate series of changes which must be in- 
 vestigated in their own light, under their own special 
 conditions. The expression " sum of vital unities " 
 applies to the chemical actions, as well as to other 
 actions localized in special parts ; and when the dis- 
 tinguished chemists whom I have just cited entitle 
 their work a treatise on the immediate principles of the 
 body, they only indicate the nature of that profound 
 and subtile analysis which must take the place of all 
 hasty generalizations founded on a comparison of the 
 food with residual products. 
 
 I will only call your attention to the fact, that the 
 exceptional phenomenon of the laboratory is the pre- 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 41 
 
 vailing law of the organism. Nutrition itself is but one 
 great catalytic process. As the blood travels its rounds, 
 each part selects its appropriate element and transforms 
 it to its own likeness. Whether the appropriating agent 
 be cell or nucleus, or a structureless solid like the in- 
 tercellular substance of cartilage, the fact of its pres- 
 ence determines the separation of its proper constitu- 
 ents from the circulating fluid, so that even when we 
 are wounded bone is replaced by bone, skin by skin, 
 and nerve by nerve. 
 
 It is hardly without a smile that we resuscitate the 
 old question of the vis insita of the muscular fibre, so 
 famous in the discussions of Haller and his contempo- 
 raries. Speaking generally, I think we may say that 
 Haller's doctrine is the one now commonly received ; 
 namely, that the muscles contract in virtue of their 
 own inherent endowments. It is true that Kolliker 
 says no perfectly decisive fact has been brought for- 
 ward to prove that the striated muscles contract with- 
 out having been acted on by nerves. Yet Mr. Bow- 
 man's observations on the contraction of isolated fibres 
 appear decisive enough (unless we consider them inval- 
 idated by Dr. Lionel Beale's recent researches, tending 
 to show that each elementary fibre is supplied with 
 nerves *) ; and as to the smooth muscular fibres, we 
 have Virchow's statement respecting the contractility 
 
 * Proc. Koyal Society, No. XL. Vol. X., and British and Foreign Med. 
 Chir. Review for April, 1861. 
 
42 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 of those of the umbilical cord, where there is not a 
 trace of any nerves.* 
 
 In the investigation of the nervous system, anatomy 
 and physiology have gone hand in hand. It is very 
 singular that so important, and seemingly simple, a 
 fact as the connection of the nerve-tubes, at their 
 origin or in their course, with the nerve-cells, should 
 have so long remained open to doubt, as you may 
 see that it did by referring to the very complete work 
 of Sharpey and Quain, (edition of 1849,) the histo- 
 logical portion of which is cordially approved by Kol- 
 liker himself.f 
 
 Several most interesting points of the minute anat- 
 omy of the nervous centres have been laboriously 
 and skilfully worked out by a recent graduate of this 
 Medical School, in a monograph worthy to stand in 
 line with those of Lockhart Clarke, Stilling, and 
 Schroder van der Kolk.J I have had the privilege 
 of examining and of showing some of you a number 
 of Dr. Dean's skilful preparations. I have no space 
 to give even an abstract of his conclusions. I can 
 
 * See also the results of experiments with woorara and sul.phocyanide of 
 potassium. The first destroys the irritability of the nerves, the second that 
 of the muscles. The student will find a notice of Bernard's experiments 
 with these poisons in Dr. Dal ton's standard work on Physiology, which 
 if he does not own, he should at once procure. 
 
 t See also a learned note in Dr. Waldo I. Burnett's " Reviews and Ab- 
 stracts," etc., American Journal of Science, September, 1853. 
 
 J Microscopic Anatomy of the Lumbar Enlargement of the Spinal Cord. 
 By John Dean, M. D. Cambridge. 1861. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 43 
 
 only refer to his proof of the fact, that a single cell 
 may send its processes into several different bun- 
 dles of nerve-roots (Fig. 7, i?), and to his demon- 
 stration of the curved ascending and descending fibres 
 from the posterior nerve-roots, to reach what he has 
 called the longitudinal columns of the cornua (Fig. 
 8, h, K). I must also mention Dr. Dean's exquisite 
 microscopic photographs from sections of the medulla 
 oblongata, which appear to me to promise a new de- 
 velopment, if not a new epoch, in anatomical art. 
 
 It having been settled that the nerve-tubes can 
 very commonly be traced directly to the nerve-cells, 
 the object of all the observers in this department of 
 anatomy is to follow these tubes to their origin. We 
 have an infinite snarl of telegraph-wires, and we may 
 be reasonably sure that, if we can follow them up, we 
 shall find each of them ends in a battery somewhere. 
 One of the most interesting problems is to find the 
 ganglionic origin of the great nerves of the medulla 
 oblongata, and this is the end to which, by the aid of 
 the most delicate sections, colored so as to bring out 
 their details, mounted so as to be imperishable, mag- 
 nified by the best instruments, and now self-recorded 
 in the light of the truth-telling sunbeam, our fellow- 
 student is making a steady progress in a labor which 
 I think bids fair to rank with the most valuable con- 
 tributions to histology that we have had from this side 
 of the Atlantic. 
 
 It is interesting to see how old questions are inci- 
 
44 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 dentally settled in the course of these new investiga- 
 tions. Thus, Mr. Clarke's dissections, confirmed by- 
 preparations of Mr. Dean's which I have myself ex- 
 amined, place the fact of the decussation of the pyra- 
 mids — denied by Haller, by Morgagni, and even by 
 Stilling — beyond doubt. So the spinal canal, the ex- 
 istence of which, at least in the adult, has been so often 
 disputed, appears as a coarse and unequivocal anatomi- 
 cal fact in many of the preparations referred to. 
 
 While these studies of the structure of the cord 
 have been going on, the ingenious and indefatigable 
 Brown-Se*quard has been investigating the functions 
 of its different parts with equal diligence. The mi- 
 croscopic anatomists had shown that the ganglionic 
 corpuscles of the gray matter of the cord are con- 
 nected with each other by their processes, as well as 
 with the nerve-roots. M. Brown-Se*quard has proved 
 by numerous experiments that the gray substance 
 transmits sensitive impressions and muscular stimula- 
 tion. The oblique ascending and descending fibres 
 from the posterior nerve-roots, joining the " longitudi- 
 nal columns of the cornua," * account for the results 
 of Brown-S6quard's sections of the posterior columns.! 
 The physiological experimenter has also made it evi- 
 dent that the decussation of the conductors of sensi- 
 tive impressions has its seat in the spinal cord, and 
 not in the encephalon, as had been supposed. Not 
 
 * Dean's Memoir, Fig. 8. 
 
 t Lectures, (Philadelphia, I860,) Lect. II. p. 26, and Plate I. fig. 7. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 45 
 
 less remarkable than these results are the facts, which 
 I with others of my audience have had the opportunity 
 of observing, as shown by M. Brown-Se'quard, of the 
 artificial production of epilepsy in animals by injuring 
 the spinal cord, and the induction of the paroxysm by 
 pinching a certain portion of the skin. I would also 
 call the student's attention to his account of the rela- 
 tions of the nervous centres to nutrition and secre- 
 tion, the last of which relations has been made the 
 subject of an extended essay by our fellow-country- 
 man, Dr. H. F. Campbell, of Georgia. 
 
 The physiology of the spinal cord seems a simple 
 matter as you study it in Longet. The experiments 
 of Brown-Se'quard have shown the problem to be 
 a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as 
 they have solved questions ; at any rate, I believe all 
 lecturers on physiology agree that there is no part of 
 their task they dread so much as the analysis of the evi- 
 dence relating to the special offices of the different por- 
 tions of the medulla spinalis. In the brain we are sure 
 that we do not know how to localize functions ; in the 
 spinal cord, we think we do know something ; but there 
 are so many anomalies, and seeming contradictions, and 
 sources of fallacy, that, beyond the facts of crossed pa- 
 ralysis of sensation, and the conducting* agency of the 
 gray substance, I am afraid we retain no cardinal 
 principles discovered since the development of the 
 reflex function took its place by Sir Charles Bell's great 
 discovery. 
 
46 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you 
 will see that I am obliged to leave phrenology sub 
 Jove, — out in the cold, — as not one of the household 
 of science. I am not one of its haters ; on the contrary, 
 I am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I 
 love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen 
 to the glib professor, as he discovers by his manipula- 
 tions 
 
 " All that disgraced my betters met in me." 
 
 I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurz- 
 heim make a brain flower out into a corolla of marrowy 
 filaments, as Vieussens had done before him, and to hear 
 the dry-fibred but human-hearted George Combe teach 
 good sense under the disguise of his equivocal system. 
 But the pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem 
 to me only appeals to weak minds and the weak points 
 of strong ones. There is a pica or false appetite in 
 many intelligences ; they take to odd fancies in place of 
 wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and charcoal. 
 Phrenology juggles with nature. It is so adjusted 
 as to soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all 
 that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like 
 Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand 
 at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but 
 is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its undisputed central 
 domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have 
 devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the 
 light it has thrown on human actions by its study of 
 congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface 
 
W MEDICAL SCIENCE. 47 
 
 of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but 
 its studies of individual character are always interesting 
 and instructive. 
 
 The " snapping-turtle " strikes after its natural 
 fashion when it first comes out of the egg. Children 
 betray their tendencies in their way of dealing with 
 the breasts that nourish them ; nay, I can venture to 
 affirm, that long before they are born they teach their 
 mothers something of their turbulent or quiet tempers. 
 
 u Castor gaudet equis, ovo prognatus eodem 
 Pugnis." 
 
 Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology ; call it 
 anthropology ; let it study man the individual in distinc- 
 tion from man the abstraction, the metaphysical or the- 
 ological lay-figure ; and it becomes " the proper study 
 of mankind," one of the noblest and most interesting 
 of pursuits. 
 
 The whole physiology of the nervous system, from 
 the simplest manifestation of its power in an insect up 
 to the supreme act of the human intelligence working 
 through the brain, is fall of the most difficult yet pro- 
 foundly interesting questions. The singular relations 
 between electricity and nerve-force, — relations which 
 it has been attempted to interpret as meaning identity, 
 in the face of palpable differences, require still more 
 extended studies. You may be interested by Professor 
 Faraday's statement of his opinion on the matter. 
 " Though I am not satisfied that the nervous fluid is 
 only electricity, still I think that the agent in the 
 
48 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 nervous system may be an inorganic force ; and if 
 there be reason for supposing that magnetism is a 
 higher relation of force than electricity, so it may 
 well be imagined that the nervous power may be of 
 a still more exalted character, and yet within the reach 
 of experiment." 
 
 In connection with this statement, it is interesting to 
 refer to the experiments of Helmholtz on the rapidity 
 of transmission of the nervous actions. The rate is 
 given differently in Valentin's report of these experi- 
 ments and in that found in the Scientific Annual for 
 1858. One hundred and eighty to three hundred feet 
 per second is the rate of movement assigned for sen- 
 sation, but all such results must be very vaguely 
 approximative. Boxers, fencers, players at the Italian 
 game of mora, " prestidigitators," and all who depend 
 for their success on rapidity of motion, know what dif- 
 ferences there are in the personal equation of move- 
 ment. 
 
 Keflex action, the mechanical sympathy, if I may so 
 call it, of distant parts ; Instinct, which is crystallized 
 intelligence, — an absolute law with its invariable planes 
 and angles introduced into the sphere of conscious- 
 ness, as raphides are enclosed in the living cells of 
 plants ; Intellect, — the operation of the thinking prin- 
 ciple through material organs, with an appreciable 
 waste of tissue in every act of thought, so that our 
 clergymen's blood has more phosphates to get rid of 
 on Monday than on any other clay of the week; 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE 49 
 
 Will, — theoretically the absolute determining power, 
 practically limited in different degrees by the varying 
 organization of races and individuals, annulled or per- 
 verted by different ill-understood organic changes ; — 
 on all these subjects our knowledge is in its infancy, 
 and from the study of some of them the interdict of 
 the Vatican is hardly yet removed. 
 
 I must allude to one or two points in the histology 
 and physiology of the organs of sense. The anterior 
 continuation of the retina beyond the ora serrata has 
 been a subject of much discussion. If H. Miiller 
 and Kolliker can be relied upon, this question is set- 
 tled by recognizing that a layer of cells, continued 
 from the retina, passes over the surface of the zonula 
 Zinnii, but that no proper nervous element is so pro- 
 longed forward. 
 
 I observe that Kolliker calls the true nervous ele- 
 ments of the retina " the layer of gray cerebral sub- 
 stance." In fact, the ganglionic corpuscles of each 
 eye may be considered as constituting a little brain, 
 connected with the masses behind by the commissure, 
 commonly called the optic nerve. We are prepared, 
 therefore, to find these two little brains in the most 
 intimate relations with each other, as we find the 
 cerebral hemispheres. We know that they are di- 
 rectly connected by fibres that arch round through 
 the chiasma. 
 
 I mention these anatomical facts to introduce a 
 physiological observation of my own, first announced 
 
50 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 in one of the lectures before the Medical Class, sub- 
 sequently communicated to the American Academy 
 of Arts and Sciences, and printed in its " Transac- 
 tions " for February 14, 1860. I refer to the appar- 
 ent transfer of impressions from one retina to the other, 
 to which I have given the name reflex vision. The 
 idea was suggested to me in consequence of certain 
 effects noticed in employing the stereoscope. Profes- 
 sor William B. Rodgers has since called the attention 
 of the American Scientific Association to some facts 
 bearing on the subject, and to a very curious experi- 
 ment of Leonardo da Vinci's, which enables the ob- 
 server to look through the palm of his hand (or seem 
 to), as if it had a hole bored through it. As he and 
 others hesitated to accept my explanation, I was not 
 sorry to find recently the following words in the " Ob- 
 servations on Man " of that acute observer and thinker, 
 David Hartley.* 
 
 " An impression made on the right eye alone by a 
 single object may* propagate itself into the left, and 
 there raise up an image almost equal in vividness to 
 itself; and consequently when we see with one eye 
 only, we may, however, have pictures in both eyes." 
 Hartley, in 1784, had anticipated many of the doctrines 
 which have since been systematized into the theory 
 of reflex actions, and with which I have attempted 
 to associate this act of reflex vision. My sixth ex- 
 periment, however, in the communication referred to, 
 
 * Vol. I. p. 207. London, 1801. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 51 
 
 appears to me to be a crucial one, proving the cor- 
 rectness of my explanation, and I am not aware that it 
 has been before instituted. 
 
 Another point of great interest connected with the 
 physiology of vision, and involved for a long time in 
 great obscurity, is that of the adjustment of the eye to 
 different distances. Dr. Clay Wallace, of New York, 
 who published a very ingenious little book on the eye 
 about twenty years ago, with vignettes reminding one 
 of Bewick, was among the first, if not the first, to de- 
 scribe the ciliary muscle, to which the power of adjust- 
 ment is generally ascribed. It is ascertained, by exact 
 experiment with the phcenidoscope, that accommodation 
 depends on change of form of the crystalline lens. 
 Where the crystalline is wanting, as Mr. Ware long 
 ago taught, no power of accommodation remains. The 
 ciliary muscle is generally thought to effect the change 
 of form of the crystalline. The power of accommoda- 
 tion is lost after the application of atropine, in conse- 
 quence, as is supposed, of the paralysis of this muscle. 
 This, I believe, is the nearest approach to a demon- 
 stration we have on this point. 
 
 I have only time briefly to refer to Professor Draper's 
 most ingenious theory as to the photographic nature of 
 vision, for an account of which I must refer to his 
 original and interesting Treatise on Physiology. 
 
 It were to be wished that the elaborate and very 
 interesting researches of the Marquis Corti, which have 
 revealed such singular complexity of structure in the 
 
52 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 cochlea of the ear, had done more to clear up its doubt- 
 ful physiology ; but I am afraid we have nothing but 
 hypotheses for the special part it plays in the act of 
 hearing, and that we must say the same respecting the 
 office of the semicircular canals. 
 
 The microscope has achieved some of its greatest 
 triumphs in teaching us the changes which occur in the 
 development of the embryo. No more interesting dis- 
 covery stands recorded in the voluminous literature of 
 this subject than the one originally announced by Mar- 
 tin Barry, afterwards discredited, and still later con- 
 firmed by Mr. Newport and others ; namely, the fact 
 that the fertilizing filament reaches the interior of the 
 ovum in various animals ; — a striking parallel to the 
 action of the pollen-tube in the vegetable. But beyond 
 the mechanical facts all is mystery in the movements 
 of organization, as profound as in the fall of a stone or 
 the formation of a crystal. 
 
 To the chemist and the microscopist the living body 
 presents the same difficulties, arising from the fact that 
 everything is in perpetual change in the organism. The 
 fibrine of the blood puzzles the one as much as its glob- 
 ules puzzle the other. The difference between the 
 branches of science which deal with space only, and 
 those which deal with space and time, is this : we have 
 no glasses that can magnify time. The figure I here 
 show you* was photographed from an object (pleuro- 
 
 • From a very interesting paper by Professor 0. N. Rood, of Albany, 
 containing, with other views, the first microscopic stereograph I have seen. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 53 
 
 sigma angulatum) magnified a thousand diameters, or 
 presenting a million times its natural surface. This 
 other figure of the same object, enlarged from the one 
 just shown, is magnified seven thousand diameters, or 
 forty-nine million times in surface. When we can 
 make the forty-nine millionth of a second as long as 
 its integer, physiology and chemistry will approach 
 nearer the completeness of anatomy. 
 
 Our reverence becomes more worthy, or, if you will, 
 less unworthy of its Infinite Object in proportion as 
 our intelligence is lifted and expanded to a higher and 
 broader understanding of the Divine methods of action. 
 If Galen called his heathen readers to admire " the 
 power, the wisdom, the providence, the goodness of the 
 Framer of the animal body," — if Mr. Boyle, the stu- 
 dent of nature, as Addison and that friend of his who 
 had known him for forty years tell us, never uttered 
 the name of the Supreme Being without making a dis- 
 tinct pause in his speech, in token of his devout recog- 
 nition of its awful meaning, — surely we, who inherit 
 the accumulated wisdom of nearly two hundred years 
 since the time of the British philosopher, and of almost 
 two thousand since the Greek physician, may well lift 
 our thoughts from the works we study to their great 
 Artificer. These wonderful discoveries which we owe 
 to that mighty little instrument, the telescope of the 
 inner firmament with all its included worlds ; these 
 simple formulae by which we condense the observations 
 
54 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 of a generation in a single axiom ; these logical analy- 
 ses by which we fence out the ignorance we cannot re- 
 claim, and fix the limits of our knowledge, — all lead us 
 up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives under- 
 standing to the world's great teachers. To fear science 
 or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear 
 the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our 
 fellow-men ; for what is science but the piecemeal 
 revelation — uncovering — of the plan of creation, by 
 the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom 
 God has illuminated from the central light of truth 
 for that single purpose ? 
 
 The studies which we have glanced at are prelim- 
 inary in your education to the practical arts which 
 make use of them, — the arts of healing, — surgery 
 and medicine. The more you examine the structure 
 of the organs and the laws of life, the more you will 
 find how resolutely each of the cell-republics which 
 make up the E pluribus unum of the body maintains 
 its independence. Guard it, feed it, air it, warm it, 
 exercise or rest it properly, and the working elements 
 will do their best to keep well or to get well. What do 
 we do with ailing vegetables ? Dr. Warren, my hon- 
 ored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, 
 including half of an old orchard. A few years after- 
 wards I saw the trees on his side of the fence looking 
 in good health, while those on the other side were 
 scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 55 
 
 change was brought about ? By watering them with 
 Fowler's solution ? By digging in calomel freely about 
 their roots ? Not at all ; but by loosening the soil 
 round them, and supplying them with the right kind 
 of food in fitting quantities. 
 
 Now a man is not a plant, or, at least, he is a very 
 curious one, for he carries his soil in his stomach, 
 which is a kind of portable flower-pot, and he grows 
 round it, instead of out of it. He has, besides, a singu- 
 larly complex nutritive apparatus and a nervous sys- 
 tem. But recollect the doctrine already enunciated 
 in the language of Virchow, that an animal, like 
 a tree, is a sum of vital unities, of which the cell is 
 the ultimate element. Every healthy cell, whether 
 in a vegetable or an animal, necessarily performs its 
 function properly so long as it is supplied with its 
 proper materials and stimuli. A cell may, it is true, 
 be congenitally defective, in which case disease is, so 
 to speak, its normal state. But if originally sound 
 and subsequently diseased, there has certainly been 
 some excess, deficiency, or wrong quality in the mate- 
 rials or stimuli applied to it. You remove this inju- 
 rious influence and substitute a normal one ; remove 
 the baked coal-ashes, for instance, from the roots of 
 a tree, and replace them with loam ; take away the 
 salt meat from the patient's table, and replace it with 
 fresh meat and vegetables, and the cells of the tree 
 or the man return to their duty. 
 
 I do not know that we ever apply to a plant any 
 
56 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 element which is not a natural constituent of the 
 vegetable structure, except perhaps externally, for the 
 accidental purpose of killing parasites. The whole 
 art of cultivation consists in learning the proper food 
 and conditions of plants, and supplying them. We 
 give them water, earths, salts of various kinds such 
 as they are made of, with a chance to help themselves 
 to air and light. The farmer would be laughed at 
 who undertook to manure his fields or his trees with 
 a salt of lead or of arsenic. These elements are not 
 constituents of healthy plants. The gardener uses the 
 waste of the arsenic furnaces to kill the weeds in his 
 walks. 
 
 If the law of the animal cell, and of the animal 
 organism, which is built up of such cells, is like that 
 of the vegetable, we might expect that we should treat 
 all morbid conditions of any of the vital unities be- 
 longing to an animal in the same way, by increasing, 
 diminishing, or changing its natural food or stimuli. 
 
 " That is an aliment which nourishes ; whatever we 
 find in the organism, as a constant and integral ele- 
 ment, either forming part of its structure, or one of 
 the conditions of vital processes, that and that only 
 deserves the name of aliment." * I see no reason, 
 therefore, why iron, phosphate of lime, sulphur, should 
 not be considered food for man, as much as guano or 
 poudrette for vegetables. Whether one or another of 
 them is best in any given case, — whether they shall 
 
 * Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, I. 76. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 57 
 
 be taken alone or in combination, in large or small 
 quantities, — are separate questions. But they are 
 elements belonging to the body, and even in mod- 
 erate excess will produce little disturbance. There 
 is no presumption against any of this class of sub- 
 stances, any more than against water or salt, provided 
 they are used in fitting combinations, proportions, and 
 forms. 
 
 But when it comes to substances alien to the healthy 
 system, which never belong to it as normal constitu- 
 ents, the case is very different. There is a presumption 
 against putting lead or arsenic into the human body, 
 as against putting them into plants, because they do 
 not belong there, any more than pounded glass, which, 
 it is said, used to be given as a poison. The same 
 thing is true of mercury and silver. What becomes 
 of these alien substances after they get into the system 
 we cannot always tell. But in the case of silver, from 
 the accident of its changing color under the influence 
 of light, we do know what happens. It is thrown 
 out, in part at least, under the epidermis, and there 
 it remains to the patient's dying day. This is a strik- 
 ing illustration of the difficulty which the system finds 
 in dealing with non-assimilable elements, and justifies 
 in some measure the vulgar prejudice against " min- 
 eral poisons." 
 
 I trust the youngest student on these benches will 
 not commit the childish error of confounding a pre- 
 sumption against a particular class of agents with a 
 3* 
 
58 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 condemnation of them. Mercury, for instance, is alien 
 to the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence. 
 Yet its efficacy in certain forms of specific disease is 
 acknowledged by all but the most sceptical theorists. 
 Even the esprit rnoqueur of Ricord, the Voltaire of 
 pelvic literature, submits to the time-honored consti- 
 tutional authority of this great panacea in the class of 
 cases to which he has devoted his brilliant intelligence. 
 Still, there is no telling what evils have arisen from the 
 abuse of this mineral. Dr. Armstrong long ago pointed 
 out some of them, and they have become matters of 
 common notoriety. I am pleased, therefore, when I 
 find so able and experienced a practitioner as Dr. Wil- 
 liams of this city proving that iritis is best treated with- 
 out mercury,* and Dr. Vanderpool showing the same 
 thing to be true for pericarditis. 
 
 Whatever elements nature does not introduce into 
 vegetables, the natural food of all animal life, — directly 
 of herbivorous, indirectly of carnivorous animals, — are 
 to be regarded with suspicion. Arsenic-eating may 
 seem to improve the condition of horses for a time, — 
 and even of human beings, if Tschudi's stories can bo 
 trusted, — but it soon appears that its alien qualities are 
 at war with the animal organization. So of copper, an- 
 timony, and other non-alimentary simple substances ; 
 every one of them is an intruder in the living system, 
 as much as a constable would be, quartered in our 
 household. This does not mean that they may not, 
 
 * On the Treatment of Iritis without Mercury, Boston, 1856. 
 
LN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 59 
 
 any of them, be called in for a special need, as we send 
 for the constable when we have good reason to think 
 we have a thief under our roof; but a man's body is 
 his castle, as well as his house, and the presumption is 
 that we are to keep our alimentary doors bolted against 
 these perturbing agents. 
 
 Now the feeling is very apt to be just contrary to this. 
 The habit has been very general with well-taught prac- 
 titioners, to have recourse to the introduction of these 
 alien elements into the system on the occasion of any 
 slight disturbance. The tongue was a little coated, 
 and mercury must be given ; the skin was a little dry, 
 and the patient must take antimony. It was like send- 
 ing for the constable and the posse comitatus when 
 there is only a carpet to shake or a refuse-barrel to 
 empty.* The constitution bears slow poisoning a great 
 deal better than might be expected ; yet the most intel- 
 ligent men in the profession have gradually got out of 
 the habit of prescribing these powerful alien substances 
 in the old routine way. Mr. Metcalf will tell you how 
 much more sparingly they are given by our- practitioners 
 at the present time, than when he first inaugurated the 
 new era of pharmacy among us. Still, the presumption 
 in favor of poisoning out every spontaneous reaction of 
 outraged nature is not extinct in those who are trusted 
 
 * Dr. James Johnson advises persons not ailing to take five grains of 
 blue pill with one or two of aloes twice a week for three or four months in 
 the year, with half a pint of compound decoction of sarsaparilla every day 
 for the same period, to preserve health a,nd prolong life. Pract. Treatise on 
 Dis. of Liver, etc., p. 272. 
 
60 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 with the lives of their fellow-citizens. " On examining 
 the file of prescriptions at the hospital, I discovered 
 that they were rudely written, and indicated a treat- 
 ment, as they consisted chiefly of tartar emetic, ipe- 
 cacuanha, and epsom salts, hardly favorable to the cure 
 of the prevailing diarrhoea and dysenteries." * In a 
 report of a poisoning case now on trial, where we are 
 told that arsenic enough was found in the stomach to 
 produce death in twenty-four hours, the patient is said 
 to have been treated by arsenic, phosphorus, bryonia, 
 aconite, nux vomica, and muriatic acid, — by a prac- 
 titioner of what school may be imagined. 
 
 The traditional idea of always poisoning out disease, 
 as we smoke out vermin, is now seeking its last refuge 
 behind the wooden cannon and painted port-holes of 
 that unblushing system of false scientific pretences 
 which I do not care to name in a discourse addressed 
 to an audience devoted to the study of the laws of 
 nature in the light of the laws of evidence. It is ex- 
 traordinary to observe that the system which, by its 
 reducing medicine to a name and a farce, has accus- 
 tomed all who have sense enough to see through its 
 thin artifices to the idea that diseases get well with- 
 out being " cured," should now be the main support 
 of the tottering poison-cure doctrine. It has unques- 
 tionably helped to teach wise people that nature heals 
 most diseases without help from pharmaceutic art, but 
 
 * United States Sanitary Commission, Document No. 25. Report on a 
 Regiment near Washington, dated July 9th, 1861. 
 
W MEDICAL SCIENCE. 61 
 
 it continues to persuade fools that art can arrest them 
 all with its specifics. 
 
 It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to 
 check the freest expression of opinion as to the effi- 
 cacy of any or all of the " heroic " means of treatment 
 employed by practitioners of different schools and pe- 
 riods. Medical experience is a great thing, but we 
 must not forget that there is a higher experience, which 
 tries its results in a court of a still larger jurisdiction ; 
 that, namely, in which the laws of human belief are 
 summoned to the witness-box, and obliged to testify to 
 the sources of error which beset the medical practi- 
 tioner. The verdict is as old as the father of medicine, 
 who announces it in the words, "judgment is difficult." 
 Physicians differed so in his time, that some denied 
 that there was any such thing as an art of medicine. 
 One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by 
 another. The art of healing was like soothsaying, so 
 the common people said ; the same bird was lucky or 
 unlucky, according as he flew to the right or left.* 
 
 The practice of medicine has undergone great chan- 
 ges within the period of my own observation. Vene- 
 section, for instance, has so far gone out of fashion, 
 that, as I am told by residents of the New York 
 Bellevue and the Massachusetts General Hospitals, 
 it is almost obsolete in these institutions, at least in 
 medical practice.f The old Brunonian stimulating 
 
 * ETepi Aiairrjs 'O^cW, § IV. v. 
 
 t A similar change has taken place also in English surgical practice. 
 Sir W. Napier speaks of " that inveterate use of the lancet, which dis- 
 
62 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 treatment has come into vogue again in the practice 
 of Dr. Todd and his followers. The compounds 
 of mercury have yielded their place as drugs of all 
 work, and specifics for that very frequent subjective 
 complaint, nescio quid faciam — to compounds of io- 
 dine.* Opium is believed in, and quinine, and "rum," 
 using that expressive monosyllable to mean all alco- 
 holic cordials. If MoliSre were writing now, instead 
 of saignare, purgare, and the other, he would be more 
 like to say, Stimulare^ opium dare et potassio-iodizare. 
 I have been in relation successively with the Eng- 
 lish and American evacuant and alterative practice, in 
 which calomel and antimony figured so largely that, 
 as you may see in Dr. Jackson's last " Letter," Dr. 
 Holyoke, a good representative of sterling old-fash- 
 ioned medical art, counted them with opium and Pe- 
 ruvian bark as his chief remedies ; with the moderately 
 expectant practice of Louis ; the blood-letting " coup 
 mr coup " of Bouillaud ; the contra-stimulant method 
 of Rasori and his followers ; the anti-irritant system 
 of Broussais, with its leeching and gum- water ; I have 
 heard from our own students of the simple opium 
 practice of the renowned German teacher, Oppolzer ; 
 and now I find the medical community brought round 
 by the revolving cycle of opinion to that same old 
 
 graced the surgery of the times," — the early years of this century. Life 
 and Opinions of Sir Charles James Napier, (London, 1857,) Vol. I. p. 153. 
 * Sir Astley Cooper has the boldness — or honesty — to speak of medi- 
 cines which " are given as much to assist the medical man as his patient." 
 Lectures, (London, 1832,) p. 14. 
 
m MEDICAL SCIENCE. bd 
 
 plan of treatment which John Brown taught in Edin- 
 burgh in the last quarter of the last century, and 
 Miner and Tully fiercely advocated among ourselves 
 in the early years of the present. The worthy physi- 
 cians last mentioned, and their antagonist, Dr. Gallup, 
 used stronger language than we of these degenerate 
 days permit ourselves. " The lancet is a weapon 
 which annually slays more than the sword," says Dr. 
 Tully. " It is probable that, for forty years past, opium 
 and its preparations have done seven times the injury 
 they have rendered benefit, on the great scale of the 
 world," says Dr. Gallup. 
 
 What is the meaning of these perpetual changes 
 and conflicts of medical opinion and practice, from an 
 early antiquity to our own time ? Simply this : all 
 " methods " of treatment end in disappointment of 
 those extravagant expectations which men are wont 
 to entertain of medical art. The bills of mortality 
 are more obviously affected by drainage, than by this 
 or that method of practice. The insurance compa- 
 nies do not commonly charge a different percentage 
 on the lives of the patients of this or that physician. 
 In the course of a generation, more or less, physicians 
 themselves are liable to get tired of a practice which 
 has so little effect upon the average movement of vital 
 decomposition. Then they are ready for a change, 
 even if it were back again to a method which has 
 already been tried, and found wanting. 
 
 Our practitioners, or many of them, have got back to 
 
64 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 the ways of old Dr. Samuel Danforth, who, as it is well 
 known, had strong objections to the use of the lancet. 
 By and by a new reputation will be made by some dis- 
 contented practitioner, who, tired of seeing patients die 
 with their skins full of whiskey and their brains muddy 
 with opium, returns to a bold antiphlogistic treatment, 
 and has the luck to see a few patients of note get well 
 under it. So of the remedies which have gone out of 
 fashion and been superseded by others. It can hardly 
 be doubted that they will come into vogue again, more 
 or less extensively, under the influence of that irre- 
 sistible demand for change just referred to. 
 
 Then will come the usual talk about a change in 
 the character of disease, which has about as much 
 meaning as that concerning " old-fashioned snow- 
 storms." " Epidemic constitutions " of disease mean 
 something, no doubt ; a great deal as applied to mala- 
 rious affections ; but that the whole type of diseases 
 undergoes such changes that the practice must be 
 reversed from depleting to stimulating, and vice versa, 
 is much less likely than that methods of treatment go 
 out of fashion and come in again. If there is any 
 disease which claims its percentage with reasonable 
 uniformity, it is phthisis. Yet I remember that the 
 reverend and venerable Dr. Prince, of Salem, told me 
 one Commencement day, as I was jogging along to- 
 wards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the 
 time when that disease was hardly known; and in 
 confirmation of his statement mentioned a case in 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 65 
 
 which it was told as a great event, that somebody 
 down on " the Cape " had died of " a consumption." 
 This story does not sound probable to myself, as I 
 repeat it, yet I assure you it is true, and it shows 
 how cautiously we must receive all popular stories 
 of great changes in the habits of disease.* 
 
 Is there no progress, then, but do we return to the 
 same beliefs and practices which our forefathers wore 
 out and threw away ? I trust and believe that there 
 is a real progress. We may, for instance, return in 
 a measure to the Brunonian stimulating system, but 
 it must be in a modified way, for we cannot go back 
 to the simple Brunonian pathology, since we have 
 learned too much of diseased action to accept its con- 
 venient dualism. So of other doctrines, each new 
 Avatar strips them of some of their old pretensions, 
 until they take their fitting place at last, if they 
 have any truth in them, or disappear, if they were 
 mere phantasms of the imagination. 
 
 In the mean time, while medical theories are com- 
 ing in and going out, there is a set of sensible men 
 who are never run away with by them, but practise 
 their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same 
 way from generation to generation. From the time 
 of Hippocrates to that of our own medical patriarch, 
 there has been an apostolic succession of wise and good 
 practitioners. If you will look at the first aphorism 
 
 * See Brit, and For. Med.-Chir. Rev. for Oct., 1860, p. 239. The last two 
 paragraphs were in type before I had seen the article here referred to. 
 
66 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 of the ancient Master, you will see that before all rem- 
 edies he places the proper conduct of the patient and 
 his attendants, and the fit ordering of all the condi- 
 tions surrounding him. The class of practitioners I 
 have referred to have always been the most faithful in 
 attending to these points. No doubt they have some- 
 times prescribed unwisely, in compliance with the 
 prejudices of their time, but they have grown wiser 
 as they have grown older, and learned to trust more 
 in nature and less in their plans of interference. I 
 believe common opinion confirms Sir James Clark's 
 observation to this effect. 
 
 The experience of the profession must, I think, run 
 parallel with that of the wisest of its individual mem- 
 bers. Each time a plan of treatment or a particular 
 remedy comes up for trial, it is submitted to a sharper 
 scrutiny. When Cullen wrote his Materia Medica, he 
 had seriously to assail the practice of giving burnt 
 toad, which was still countenanced by at least one 
 medical authority of note. I have read recently in 
 some medical journal, that an American practitioner, 
 whose name is known to the country, is prescribing 
 the hoof of a horse for epilepsy. It was doubtless sug- 
 gested by that old fancy of wearing a portion of elk's- 
 hoof hung round the neck or in a ring, for this dis- 
 ease. But it is hard to persuade reasonable people to 
 swallow the abominations of a former period. The 
 evidence which satisfied Fernelius will not serve one 
 of our hospital physicians. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 67 
 
 In this way those articles of the Materia Medica 
 which had nothing but loathsomeness to recommend 
 them have been gradually dropped, and are not like 
 to obtain any general favor again with civilized com- 
 munities. The next culprits to be tried are the poi- 
 sons. I have never been in the least sceptical as to 
 the utility of some of them, when properly employed. 
 Though I believe that at present, taking the world at 
 large, and leaving out a few powerful agents of such 
 immense value that they rank next to food in impor- 
 tance, the poisons prescribed for disease do more hurt 
 than good, I have no doubt, and never professed to have 
 any, that they do much good in prudent and instructed 
 hands. But I am very willing to confess a great jeal- 
 ousy of many agents, and I could almost wish to see 
 the Materia Medica so classed as to call suspicion upon 
 certain ones among them. 
 
 Thus the alien elements^ those which do not properly 
 enter into the composition of any living tissue, are the 
 most to be suspected, — mercury, lead, antimony, silver, 
 and the rest, for the reasons I have before mentioned. 
 Even iodine, which, as it is found in certain plants, 
 seems less remote from the animal tissues, gives une- 
 quivocal proofs from time to time that it is hostile to 
 some portions of the glandular system. 
 
 There is, of course, less prima facie objection to 
 those agents which consist of assimilable elements, 
 such as are found making- a part of healthy tissues. 
 These are divisible into three classes, — foods, poisons, 
 
68 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances. The 
 food of one animal or of one human being is some- 
 times poison to another, and vice versa; inert sub- 
 stances may act mechanically, so as to produce the 
 effect of poisons ; but this division holds exactly 
 enough for our purpose. 
 
 Strictly speaking, every poison consisting of assimi- 
 lable elements may be considered as unwholesome food. 
 It is rejected by the stomach, or it produces diarrhoea, 
 or it causes vertigo or disturbance of the heart's ac- 
 tion, or some other symptom for which the subject 
 of it would consult the physician, if it came on from 
 any other cause than taking it under the name of 
 medicine. Yet portions of this unwholesome food 
 which we call medicine, we have reason to believe, 
 are assimilated ; thus, castor-oil appears to be par- 
 tially digested by infants, so that they require large 
 doses to affect them medicinally. Even that deadliest 
 of poisons, hydrocyanic acid, is probably assimilated, 
 and helps to make living tissue, if it do not kill the 
 patient, for the assimilable elements which it contains, 
 given in the separate forms of amygdalin and emulsin, 
 produce no disturbance, unless, as in Bernard's ex- 
 periments, they are suffered to meet in the digestive 
 organs. A medicine consisting of assimilable sub- 
 stances being then simply unwholesome food, we un- 
 derstand what is meant by those cumulative effects of 
 such remedies often observed, as in the case of digi- 
 talis and strychnia. They are precisely similar to the 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 69 
 
 cumulative effects of a salt diet in producing scurvy, 
 or of spurred rye in producing dry gangrene. As 
 the effects of such substances are a violence to the 
 organs, we should exercise the same caution with re- 
 gard to their use that we would exercise about any 
 other kind of poisonous food, — -partridges at certain 
 seasons, for instance. Even where these poisonous 
 kinds of food seem to be useful, we should still regard 
 them with great jealousy. Digitalis lowers the pulse 
 in febrile conditions. Veratrum viride does the same 
 thing. How do we know that a rapid pulse is not a 
 normal adjustment of nature to the condition it accom- 
 panies? Digitalis has gone out of favor; how sure 
 are we that Veratrum viride will not be found to do 
 more harm than good in a case of internal inflammation, 
 taking the whole course of the disease into considera- 
 tion? Think of the change of opinion with regard 
 to the use of opium in delirium tremens, (which you 
 remember is sometimes called delirium vigilans^) where 
 it seemed so obviously indicated, since the publica- 
 tion of Dr. Ware's admirable essay. I respect the 
 evidence of my contemporaries, but I cannot forget 
 the sayings of the Father of medicine, — Ars longa, 
 judicium difficile. 
 
 I am not presuming to express an opinion concern- 
 ing Veratrum viride, which was little heard of when 
 I was still practising medicine. I am only appealing 
 to that higher court of experience which sits in judg- 
 
70 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 ment on all decisions of the lower medical tribunals, 
 and which requires more than one generation for its 
 final verdict. 
 
 Once change the habit of mind so long prevalent 
 among practitioners of medicine ; once let it be every- 
 where understood that the presumption is in favor of 
 food, and hot of alien substances, of innocuous, and not 
 of unwholesome food, for the sick ; that this presump- 
 tion requires very strong evidence in each particular 
 case to overcome it ; but that, when such evidence is 
 afforded, the alien substance or the unwholesome food 
 should be given boldly, in sufficient quantities, in the 
 same spirit as that with which the surgeon lifts his 
 knife against a patient, — that is, with the same reluc- 
 tance and the same determination, — and I think we 
 shall have and hear much less of charlatanism in and 
 out of the profession. The disgrace of medicine has 
 been that colossal system of self-deception, in obedience 
 to which mines have been emptied of their cankering 
 minerals, the vegetable kingdom robbed of all its 
 noxious growths, the entrails of animals taxed for their 
 impurities, the poison-bags of reptiles drained of their 
 venom, and all the inconceivable abominations thus 
 obtained thrust down the throats of human beings 
 suffering from some fault of organization, nourishment, 
 or vital stimulation. 
 
 Much as we have gained, we have not yet thor- 
 oughly shaken off the notion that poison is the natural 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 71 
 
 food of disease, as wholesome aliment is the support 
 of health. Cowper's lines, in The Task, show the 
 matter-of-course practice of his time : — 
 
 " He does not scorn it, who has long endured 
 A fever's agonies, and/ecZ on drugs." 
 
 Dr. Kimball, of Lowell, who has been in the habit of 
 seeing a great deal more of typhoid fever than most 
 practitioners, and whose surgical exploits show him 
 not to be wanting in boldness or enterprise, can tell 
 you whether he finds it necessary to feed his patients 
 on drugs or not. His experience is, I believe, that 
 of the most enlightened and advanced portion of the 
 profession; yet I think that even in typhoid fever, 
 and certainly in many other complaints, the effects of 
 ancient habits and prejudices may still be seen in the 
 practice of some educated physicians. 
 
 To you, young men, it belongs to judge all that 
 has gone before you. You come nearer to the great 
 fathers of modern medicine than some of you imagine. 
 Three of my own instructors attended Dr. Rush's 
 Lectures. The illustrious Haller mentions Rush's in- 
 augural thesis * in his Bibliotheca Anatomica ; and 
 this same Haller, brought so close to us, tells us he 
 remembers Ruysch, then an old man, and used to 
 carry letters between him and Boerhaave.f Look 
 through the history of medicine from Boerhaave to 
 
 * De Coctione Ciborum in Venlriculo. Edinb. 1768. — Bibl. Anat. II. 657. 
 f " Saepissime bonum senem vidi, ssepe Boerha avium inter et ipsum 
 literarum vector." Ibid., I. 529. 
 
72 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 this present day. You will see at once that medical 
 doctrine and practice have undergone a long series of 
 changes. You will see that the doctrine and practice 
 of our own time must probably change in their turn, 
 and that, if we can trust at all to the indications of 
 their course, it will be in the direction of an improved 
 hygiene and a simplified treatment. Especially will the 
 old habit of violating the instincts of the sick give place 
 to a judicious study of these same instincts. It will be 
 found that bodily, like mental insanity, is best man- 
 aged, for the most part, by natural soothing agencies. 
 Two centuries ago there was a prescription for scurvy 
 containing " stercoris taurini et anserini par quantitas 
 trium magnarum nucum" of the hell-broth containing 
 which "quoties-eumque sitit ceger, large bibit." * When 
 I have recalled the humane common-sense of Captain 
 Cook in the matter of preventing this disease ; when 
 I have heard my friend, Mr. Dana, describing the 
 avidity with which the scurvy-stricken sailors snuffed 
 up the earthy fragrance of fresh raw potatoes, the food 
 which was to supply the elements wanting to their 
 spongy tissues, — I have recognized that the perfection 
 of art is often a return to nature, and seen in this 
 single instance the germ of innumerable beneficent 
 future medical reforms. 
 
 I cannot help believing that medical curative treat- 
 ment will by and by resolve itself in great measure 
 into modifications of the food, swallowed and breathed, 
 
 * Schenck, Observ. Med. Rev., (Lugdnni, 1643,) p. 800. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 73 
 
 and of the natural stimuli, and that less will be ex- 
 pected from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, 
 either alien or assimilable. The noted mineral-waters 
 containing iron, sulphur, carbonic acid, supply nutri- 
 tious or stimulating materials to the body as much as 
 phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to 
 the cereal plants. The effects of a milk and vegetable 
 diet, of gluten bread in diabetes, of cod-liver oil in 
 phthisis, even of such audacious innovations as the 
 water-cure and the grape-cure, are only hints of what 
 will be accomplished when we have learned to discover 
 what organic elements are deficient or in excess in a 
 case of chronic disease, and the best way of correcting 
 the abnormal condition, just as an agriculturist ascer- 
 tains the wants of his crops and modifies the composi- 
 tion of his soil. In acute febrile diseases we have long 
 ago discovered that far above all drug-medication is 
 the use of mild liquid diet in the period of excite- 
 ment, and of stimulant and nutritious food in that 
 of exhaustion. Hippocrates himself was as particular 
 about his barley-ptisan as any Florence Nightingale 
 of our time could be. 
 
 The generation to which you, who are just enter- 
 ing the profession, belong, will make a vast stride for- 
 ward, as I believe, in the direction of treatment by 
 natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that 
 makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of 
 English physicians ? His prescriptions consisted prin- 
 cipally of simples. An aperient or an opiate, a " car- 
 4 
 
74 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 diac " or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst 
 of a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. 
 It was not by his pharmaceutic prescriptions that he 
 gained his great name. It was by daring to order 
 fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horse- 
 bach for consumptives, in place of the smothering sys- 
 tem, and the noxious and often loathsome rubbish of 
 the established schools. Of course Sydenham was 
 much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently 
 takes occasion to remind his reader. " I must needs 
 conclude," he says, " either that I am void of merit, 
 or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who 
 are formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to 
 be no strangers to gratitude, make a very small part 
 of the whole." * If in the fearless pursuit of truth 
 you should find the world as ungracious in the nine- 
 teenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you 
 may learn a lesson of self-reliance from another utter- 
 ance of the same illustrious physician: "'Tis none 
 of my business to inquire what other persons think, but 
 to establish my own observations ; in order to which, I 
 ask no favor of the reader but to peruse my writings 
 with temper." f 
 
 The physician has 'learned a great deal from the 
 surgeon, who is naturally in advance of him, because 
 he has a better opportunity of seeing the effects of 
 
 * Of the Small-Pox and Hysteric Diseases. Epistle to Dr. William 
 Cole, § 140, Swan's Translation, 
 t Works, Preface, p. xxi. 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 75 
 
 his remedies. Let me shorten one of Ambroise Parens 
 stories for you. There had been a great victory at the 
 pass of Susa, and they were riding into the city. The 
 wounded cried out as the horses trampled them under 
 their hoofs, which caused good Ambroise great pity, 
 and made him wish himself back in Paris. Going into 
 a stable he saw four dead soldiers, and three desper- 
 ately wounded, placed with their backs against the 
 wall. An old campaigner came up. — " Can these fel- 
 lows get well ? " he said. " No ! " answered the sur- 
 geon. Thereupon, the old soldier walked up to them 
 and cut all their throats, sweetly, and without wrath 
 (doulcement et sans cholere). Ambroise told him he 
 was a bad man to do such a thing. " I hope to God," 
 he said, " somebody will do as much for me if I ever 
 get into such a scrape " (accoustre de telle fagoti). 
 " I was not much salted in those days " (lien doux de 
 seZ), says Ambroise, " and little acquainted with the 
 treatment of wounds." However, as he tells us, he 
 proceeded to apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after 
 the approved fashion of the time, — with what torture 
 to the patient may be guessed. At last his precious 
 oil gave out,, and he used instead an insignificant 
 mixture of his own contrivance. He could not sleep 
 that night for fear his patients who had not been 
 scalded with the boiling oil would be poisoned by 
 the gunpowder conveyed into their wounds by the 
 balls. To his surprise, he found them much better 
 than the others the next morning, and resolved never 
 
76 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 again to burn his patients with hot oil for gun-shot 
 wounds.* 
 
 This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, 
 of that reform which has introduced plain water-dress- 
 ings in the place of the farrago of external applications 
 which had been a source of profit to apothecaries and 
 disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny 
 complained of them. A young surgeon who was at 
 Sudley Church, laboring among the wounded of Bull- 
 Run, tells me they had nothing but water for dressing, 
 and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to see 
 how well the wounds did under that simple treat- 
 ment. 
 
 Let me here mention a fact or two which may be of 
 use to some of you who mean to enter the public ser- 
 vice. You will, as it seems, have gun-shot wounds 
 almost exclusively to deal with. Three different sur- 
 geons, the one just mentioned and two who saw the 
 wounded of Big Bethel, assured me that they found 
 no sabre-cuts or bayonet-wounds. It is the rifle-bullet 
 from a safe distance which pierces the breasts of our 
 soldiers, and not the gallant charge of broad platoons 
 and sweeping squadrons, such as we have been in the 
 habit of considering the chosen mode of warfare of 
 ancient and modern chivalry.f 
 
 * Le Voyage de Thurin, (Euvres, (Paris, 1579,) p. 1198. 
 
 t Sir Charles James Napier had the same experience in Virginia in 
 1813. " Potomac. We have nasty sort of fighting here, amongst creeks 
 and bushes, and lose men without show." " Yankee never shows himself, 
 he keeps in the thickest wood, fires and runs off"." " These five thousand 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 77 
 
 Another fact parallels the story of the old cam- 
 paigner, and may teach some of you caution in se- 
 lecting your assistants. A chaplain told it to two of 
 our officers personally known to myself. He over- 
 heard the examination of a man who wished to drive 
 one of the " avalanche " wagons, as they call them. 
 The man was asked if he knew how to deal with 
 wounded men. " O yes," he answered ; " if they 're 
 hit here" pointing to the abdomen, " knock 'em on the 
 head, — they can't get well." 
 
 In art and outside of it you will meet the same bar- 
 barisms that Ambroise Pare* met with, — for men differ 
 less from century to century than we are apt to sup- 
 pose ; you will encounter the same opposition, if you 
 attack any prevailing opinion, that Sydenham com- 
 plained of. So far as possible, let not such experien- 
 ces breed in you a contempt for those who are the 
 subjects of folly or prejudice, or foster any love of dis- 
 pute for its own sake. Should you become authors, 
 express your opinions freely ; defend them rarely. It 
 is not often that an opinion is worth expressing, which 
 cannot take care of itself. Opposition is the best 
 mordant to fix the color of your thought in the gen- 
 eral belief. 
 
 in the open field might be attacked, but behind works it would be throw- 
 ing away lives." He calls it " an inglorious warfare," — says one of the 
 leaders is " a little deficient in gumption," — but " still my opinion is, that 
 if we tuck up our sleeves and lay our ears back we might thrash them ; 
 that is, if we caught them out of their trees, so as to slap at them with 
 the bayonet." — Life, etc., Vol. I. p. 218, et $eq. 
 
78 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 It is time to bring these crowded remarks to a close. 
 The day has been when at the beginning of a course of 
 Lectures I should have thought it fitting to exhort 
 you to diligence and entire devotion to your tasks as 
 students. It is not so now. The young man who has 
 not heard the clarion-voices of honor and of duty now- 
 sounding throughout the land, will heed no word of 
 mine. In the camp or the city, in the field or the 
 hospital, under sheltering roof, or half-protecting can- 
 vas, or open sky, shedding our own blood or stanching 
 that of our wounded defenders, students or teachers, — 
 whatever our calling and our ability, we belong, not to 
 ourselves, but to our imperilled country, whose danger 
 is our calamity, whose ruin would be our enslavement, 
 whose rescue shall be our earthly salvation ! 
 
 You cannot all follow the armies of your country to 
 the field. But remember that he who labors for the 
 general good at home is an ununiformed soldier in the 
 same holy cause with those who bear arms or minister 
 at the side of the ambulance and in the camp hospital. 
 Larrey claimed no precedence of Dupuytren, nor 
 Guthrie of Sir Astley Cooper. As for the nobleness of 
 the task for which you are preparing yourselves, I do 
 not know that I can speak of it more strongly in prose 
 than I did in the peaceful times before these days of 
 trial, in the form of verse, and I will so far trespass 
 on your time and patience as to close this Lecture by 
 reading you 
 
IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 79 
 
 THE TWO AEMIES. 
 
 As Life's unending column pours, 
 Two marshalled hosts are seen, — 
 
 Two armies on the trampled shores 
 That Death flows black between. 
 
 One marches to the drum-beat's roll, 
 The wide-mouthed clarion's bray, 
 
 And bears upon a crimson scroll, 
 " Our glory is to slay." 
 
 One moves in silence by tne stream, 
 
 With sad, yet watchful eyes, 
 Calm as the patient planet's gleam 
 
 That walks the clouded skies. 
 
 Along its front no sabres shine, 
 No blood-red pennons wave ; 
 
 Its banner bears the single line, 
 " Our duty is to save." 
 
 For those no death-bed's lingering shade ; 
 
 At Honor's trumpet-call, 
 With knitted brow and lifted blade 
 
 In Glory's arms they fall. 
 
 For these no clashing falchions bright, 
 
 No stirring battle-cry ; 
 The bloodless stabber calls by night, — 
 
 Each answers, " Here ami!" 
 
80 BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 For those the sculptor's laurelled bust, 
 
 The builder's marble piles, 
 The anthems pealing o'er their dust 
 
 Through long cathedral aisles. 
 
 For these the blossom-sprinkled turf 
 
 That floods the lonely graves, 
 When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf 
 
 In flowery-foaming waves. 
 
 Two paths lead upward from below, 
 
 And angels wait above, 
 Who count each burning life-drop's flow, 
 
 Each falling tear of Love. 
 
 Though from the Hero's bleeding breast 
 
 Her pulses Freedom drew, 
 Though the white lilies in her crest 
 
 Sprang from that scarlet dew, — 
 
 While "Valor's haughty champions wait 
 
 Till all their scars are shown, 
 Love walks unchallenged through the gate, 
 
 To sit beside the Throne ! 
 
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