[Footnote: By J. Rutherfurd Russell, M.D.]
Dr. Russell has aimed not merely at a book useful to the Faculty, which studies its own art’s history far too little, but at the much harder success of a history of medicine readable by everyone who cares for true history: one showing not only growth and change but the hidden supplies and influences behind them. If this was harder (though we doubt it, given his wide sympathies and keen insight into humanity), the success is the more honourable, and certainly a success. His partly biographical plan has helped, since the subject is easier to present in its human relations through the lives of those closest to it. Yet it remains a history of the art itself, for no art or science has life apart from the minds that foresee, discover, and verify it. It stays at whatever point it has reached until a new man appears whose new questions draw new replies from nature, the food on which a science lives, grows, and makes its history.
Readers should not suppose that because the book is readable it is slight. Much reading and research have gone into its material, real thought and argument into its construction, and it has the adornment of a poetic temperament and a keen sense of humour.
Naturally the central life in the book is Lord Bacon’s, the man who brought out of his treasures things new and old. The story leads up to him from the prehistoric times of Aesculapius, the path first becoming plain with Hippocrates, whose fine intellect and acute observation made a true physician. The Greek mind, perhaps from its artistic tendencies, was impatient of incomplete forms and preferred building a theory from the most shadowy material to the patient experiment needed for real substance. Hippocrates, not knowing how to reach a theory by rational experiment and too honest to invent one, took over the traditional theories, built on the vaguest generalizations. Those his experience taught him to reject were kept by Galen and his followers for centuries; the chief progress was the Arabians’ substitution of some of the milder medicines now in use for the terrible, often fatal drugs of the Greek and Roman physicians. The fanciful sorting of diseases into four kinds, hot, cold, moist, and dry, with remedies sorted to match and given by contraries, remained the only recognized theory of medicine for many centuries after Christ.
But among the branches of knowledge Lord Bacon thinks ill-followed he names medicine in particular, and would put it under the same rules of observation and experiment he set for learning in general. Here, as in discovering the higher laws of nature, he holds “that men have made too untimely a departure, and too remote a recess from particulars”: they hurry to conclusions and then argue from them as from facts. So let us have no traditional theories, and make none but those revealed as laws to the patient investigator who has “straightened and held fast Proteus, that he might be compelled to change his shapes,” and so reveal his nature. So Bacon had to appear partly as a destroyer of what went before, like Cardan and Paracelsus, who also pulled down but could not, like him, build up. He shared with them poetic imagination, which looks into possibility and foresees or invents. But the charlatan takes the vaguest suggestion of his mind in its favourite mood as a theory all but proved, if not a direct revelation to himself; the true thinker seeks only an hypothesis that fits facts already found, so that it suggests new experiments by which to verify or disprove it. Bacon thought hypothesis invaluable in discovering truth, but used it only as a board to write his questions to nature on, or as the next stepping-stone in a swollen river, which he supposes to be here or there and feels for with his staff. It must be proved before it counts as a law, and greatly corroborated before it is even adopted as a theory. Cardan and Paracelsus were destroyers and mystics only; they destroyed on the earth to build in the air. Bacon united both characters in the philosopher: he looked into the unknown, whence all knowledge comes, and called wonder the seed of knowledge, but would build only on the firm land of ascertained truth. What kept him right was his practical humanity. He laboured to deliver men from the ills of life by discovering the laws of the elements amid which life is lived. This kept him true, enabled him to discover the very laws of discovery, and brought him so far into rapport with the heart of nature that, like a physical prophet, his seeing outspeeded his knowing and beheld a law, dimly, long before his intellect, which had to build bridges and find straw for bricks, dared affirm the same conclusion. Truth to humanity made him true to fact, and truth to fact made him true in theory.
In this spirit of devotion to his kind he said that the deficiency he found was that physicians had not set down and handed on certain experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases.
These remarks are prompted by Dr. Russell’s true insight into Bacon’s relation to medicine and to all science. What he chiefly desires is that the principles that made medicine what it is be allowed to carry it further, to what it ought to be and must become. Through succeeding lives and theories he shows that men have made discoveries helpful to their fellows just in proportion as they followed these principles of careful observation, hypothesis, and experiment, while the most elaborate theories of the most popular physicians, born of premature generalization and invention, passed away like the crackling of thorns under a pot. Stahl, Hoffman, Boerhaave, Cullen, and Brown belong to the latter class; Harvey, Sydenham, Jenner, and Hahnemann to the former.
After the last name there is no need to say our author is a homoeopath. Whatever our private opinion of the system, justice requires us to say that books like this are as open to refutation as to ridicule, since only a good argument is worth refuting by a better. We fear few books on the subject treat it so calmly and fairly that an honest homoeopath would hand them to an opponent as an exposition of his views. There is no excitement here, but a man of liberal education, refinement, and truthfulness, with power to understand and facility to express. One of his main objects is to vindicate for homoeopathy, on the only ground on which science can stand, that of laws discovered by observation and experiment, not just a place as a fact in the history of medicine but the right to be counted among the greatest advances towards a science of curing. If he and its other advocates failed utterly in this, the heresy would still stand in history as one of the most powerful illusions that have deceived both priests and people. But the chief advantage the system will gain from the book, it seems to us, comes from his attempt, a successful one it must be confessed, to prove that homoeopathy is a development, and not a mere reaction, rooted far down in the history of science. His first mention of it, though, disavows the claim many homoeopathists make to Hippocrates as one of their order. Passing by the curious story of Galen’s patient, ill from an overdose of theriacum and cured by another dose, Paracelsus’ and Van Helmont’s ridicule of contraries, and Boerhaave’s contraries, which by his own explanation just mean whatever proves contrary to the disease by curing it, we find one of homoeopathy’s main objects, the discovery of specifics, urged by Bacon in the words already quoted. Homoeopaths, though they depend on specifics, do not believe in a specific for a disease, since a disease varies as much as the individuals it attacks; they hold that an approximate specific can be found for every well-defined stage of every individual disease, which changes, develops, and declines like a vegetable or animal life. Boyle, born the year Bacon died and heir to his mantle, shows the same strong desire for specifics, opposes compound medicines, and strongly believes in the infinitesimal dose. Neither Bacon nor Boyle was a medical man by profession; but Sydenham followed them, says Dr. Russell, in their tendency towards specifics. Jenner’s victory over the small-pox is, to homoeopaths, a grand step in their system’s development, and it lets Dr. Russell show in a strong instance that the best discoveries for delivering mankind from the ills it feels most have been met with derision, not just unbelief. This is one of his objects, and though it proves nothing of the truth of homoeopathy, it shows that opposition to it does not prove it false. That is enough: it asks to be tried on its own merits, and its foes must grant that when it is advocated so honestly and with such dignity.
Man’s need, in physics as in higher things, guides us to truth. We need no closer acquaintance with evils than we gain by combating them. Discovering what cures diseases seems the only natural way to rise by generalization to the laws of cure and the nature of disease.
The portions on Christianity’s influence on the healing art, and on the different feelings with which physicians have been regarded in different times and countries, are especially interesting.
The only part of the book whose thought we would fault is the dissertation in the second chapter on the [Greek: psuchae] and [Greek: pneuma]. We also doubt that Van Helmont’s Archaeus gets quite fair play; but these questions are too purely theoretical to discuss here. Whatever we think of the system it advocates, we rise from the book with greater respect for the profession of medicine, larger hope for its future, and a strong sense of the nobility the art confers on every practitioner aware of the dignity of his calling.