Looking back : a glance from empiricism to experiment, from superstition to research : Christian science refuted : delivered before The Middlesex Hospital Medical Society, on November 11th, 1909 / by Sir Henry Morris.

  • Morris, Henry, Sir, 1844-1926.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Looking back : a glance from empiricism to experiment, from superstition to research : Christian science refuted : delivered before The Middlesex Hospital Medical Society, on November 11th, 1909 / by Sir Henry Morris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    In the half-century which has elapsed since the corre- spondence just referred to between a member of the British Government and the heads of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, Science has made a progress unparalleled in any previous period. At that date the continued fevers, and diphtheria, erysipelas, pyaemia, septicaemia, and other septic diseases were ever present mysteries. Their immediate causes were unknown, their treatment tentative and uncer- tain, their prophylaxis of the most general and miscellaneous character. To-day all is changed. The cause of cholera is sought for amongst the microbes, and the majority of infective diseases have been proved to be due to the invasion by specific organisms, which come from without and multiply within the body. Prevention and treatment, immunity and cure, have been, thanks to experiment, placed upon a definite and sure foundation. The very microbes which cause the disease are utilized, directly or indirectly, as the means of protection against and palliation of it. But although the irrational opinions formerly enter- tained in regard to the origin of disease in particular, and to the phenomena of Nature in general, are well-nigh extinct, and although the views of science and of religion (as distinct from the theological view) are well in accord as to the uniformity and order of the material world, differences still arise in reference to the complex nature of man, and the relation of the mental and the material parts of him. It is too much to expect that all opposition to science and research have ceased, and that superstition is got rid of altogether. Though the struggle between theology and science is probably over, and plague and pestilence, as well as earth- quakes and famine, are now universally admitted to be the natural effects of other antecedent material events, research by experiment is at the present time being hotly resisted by a band of no doubt well-meaning persons, whose intentions are good but whose methods are tortuous. This band having, by way of exciting prejudice, stigmatized experi- ments on living animals with the name of Vivisection— as though all instead of a mere fraction of an unit per cent.