veterinary surgeon, were frequently combined in one person in the early part of the present century.
What a contrast appears to-day! Popular medicine and hygiene are becoming everywhere the fashion. Public sentiment and action are aroused in regard to all manner of sanitary and curative measures. When men of distinction are ill, the conditions of their pulse, temperature, and respirations are telegraphed all over the civilized world, to be read at the breakfast-table in the morning newspaper. Their medicines and their doses are minutely described; diagrams of the course of a bullet, or startling pictures of microscopic sections of tumors, or views of cholera-germs, appear in our daily papers; and in the most popular family magazines we read articles upon the "anatomy of the brain," or "how to trap a soil-pipe." We have a mother's magazine devoted to improvements in baby-feeding and the scientific development of the infant mind. The book-stores abound in popular works upon every medical topic, from the subject of singers' sore throats to the treatment of sea-sickness, consumption, or the opium-habit. A great deal of all this, especially the newspaper medicine, is fostered by a maudlin craving for every detail of that which is exciting or horrible. It is to cater to the same kind of feeling that newspapers describe how many lumps of sugar a condemned murderer took in his coffee on the morning of his hanging. The germ-theory, too, has given a great impetus to popular medicine.
The germ appeals to the average mind: it is something tangible; it may be hunted down, captured, colored, and looked at through a microscope, and then, in all its varieties, it can be held directly responsible for so much damage. There is scarcely a farmer in the country who has not read of the germ-theory. A cow-boy in Arizona was shot dead in the saddle recently by a comrade for the insult implied by calling him a "d—d microbe"!
Still, a great deal of this popular medical talk and instruction is the outcome of an earnest desire to learn to alleviate the growing evils of heredity and environment, especially in overcrowded cities. The importance of a universal knowledge of, and attention to, the laws of physiology and hygiene is becoming more and more appreciated,[1] and the elements of these subjects are taught in the public and private schools. The mental training to be acquired through the observation of biological and physiological facts is recognized as being of the greatest importance, and laboratory courses of instruction in these studies are already introduced in many of our colleges and universities side by side with the classics. There is a wide-spread popular interest in the thorough training of nurses for the sick, and in such practical and beneficial work as the establishment of diet-kitchens for the sick poor, and sanitary reforms of all kinds. We have "Sanitary Protective Leagues" and "Sanitary Aid Societies," composed princi-
- ↑ See Spencer on "Education," chap, i, p. 76, "What Knowledge is most worth."
