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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Foster regarded as the ideal method of investigation in internal medicine:[1]
Each case of illness is to the doctor in charge a scientific problem to be solved by scientific methods; this is seen more and more clearly, and acknowledged more and more distinctly year by year. Nor is it true that each science has to a certain extent its own methods, to be learnt only in that science itself; and from time to time we may see how a man eminent in one branch of science goes astray when he puts forward solutions of problems in another branch, to the special methods of which he is a stranger. In nothing is this more true than in an applied science like that of medicine. At the bedside only can the methods of clinical inquiry be really learnt; it is only here that a student can gain that kind of mind which leads him straight to the heart of disease, that genius artis, without which scientific knowledge, however varied, however accurate, becomes nothing more than a useless burden or a dangerous snare. Yet it is no less true that the mind which has been already sharpened by the methods of one science takes a keener edge, and that more quickly, when it is put on the whetstone of another science, than does a mind which knows nothing of that science. And, more than once, inquiry in one science has been quickened by the inroad of a mind coming fresh from the methods of a quite different science. For all sciences are cognate, their methods though different are allied, and certain attitudes of mind are common to them all. In respect to nothing is this more true than in respect to the methods of medicine. Our profession has been the mother of most of the sciences, and her children are ever coming back to help her. In our art, all the sciences seem to converge—physical, chemical, biological methods join hands to form the complete clinical method.
- ↑ Poster, Huxley Lecture, Nature, London, 1896, LIV., 580.
