terms, it is needless here to discuss. Such an outcome is at any rate more distant than the early investigators, in the first flush of their splendid successes, supposed:
- "For long the way appears which seemed so short
- To the less practised eye of early youth."
Meanwhile, whatever its limitations, the physiological laboratory is of immense educational importance to the prospective physician. Physiology is, in a sense, the central discipline of the medical school.[1] It is the business of the physician to restore normal functioning: normal functioning is thus his starting-point in thought, his goal in action. The physiological laboratory enables the beginner to observe the functions of the body in operation and to ascertain how they are affected by varying conditions, —a wholesome discipline for two reasons: it banishes from his mind metaphysical principles, such as vital force, depression, etc.; it tends, in exhibiting the infinite sublety and complexity of the physiological mechanism, to emphasize normal conditions rather than medication as ultimately responsible for its orderly working. The student who has been successfully trained to regard the body as an infinitely complex machine learns to doubt his capacity to mend it summarily. It is true he lacks time to master any considerable part of the field which experimentation has covered from this point of view; but characteristic and pregnant illustrations at least insure his sanity. He may do ever so little, yet for that little he cannot take anyone's word. His actual contact with facts puts him squarely on his feet and cures him once for all of mystical and empiric vagaries.
Anatomy and physiology form but the vestibule of medical education. They teach the normal structure of the body, the normal function of the parts, fluids, organs, and the conditions under which they operate. The next step carries the student in medias res; he begins pharmacology,[2]—the experimental study of the response of the body to medication.
The science got its problem in the first place from the credulity of which the traditional pharmacopoeia is the encyclopedic expression. It undertook to question the complacency and vagueness of the empiric. How far was his reliance upon specific agents justified? If at all, was it possible to ascertain the source of their efficiency and its limits?
Pharmacology was thus originally negative and critical. It rapidly pruned away exaggeration and superstition, leaving, however, a vigorous growth behind. It ascertained, for example, that quinine was administered in vain nine times out often; but that in the single condition in which it was applicable—malaria—it struck at the root of the disease by actually destroying in the blood the obnoxious parasite. The limits of the effectiveness of digitalis, atropine, strychnine, have been discovered and explained; and similarly, the utter uselessness of dozens of concoctions with which
