Experiments on life, as fundamental to the science of preventive medicine and as of question between man and brute : an address delivered on August 3rd, 1881, at the opening of the State Medicine Section of the International Medical Congress then assembled in London / by John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Experiments on life, as fundamental to the science of preventive medicine and as of question between man and brute : an address delivered on August 3rd, 1881, at the opening of the State Medicine Section of the International Medical Congress then assembled in London / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    ventive medicine to solve is, by what cross-breeding or other treatment we may convert a short-lived and morbid, into a long- lived and healthy, stock; and this, at least as regards the human race, has, I regret to say, hardly yet become a practical question. But, as regards cases of the second class, evidently the various extrinsic interferences which shorten life have to be avoided or resisted, each according to its kind; and here it is that the scientific experimenters of late years have been giving us almost daily increments of knowledge. Two early instances, vastly important in themselves, though of a comparatively crude kind, I have already mentioned; and I now wish to glance at some illustrations of the immense scope and the marvellous exactitude of the newer work. The invaluable studies of M. Pasteur, beginning in the facts of fermentation and putrefaction, and thence extending to the facts of infectious disease in the animal body, where M. Chauveau's demonstration of the particulate nature of certain contagia came to assist them—they, I say, partly in themselves, and partly in respect of kindred labours which they have excited others to undertake, have introduced us to a new world of strange know- ledge. We have learnt, as regards those diseases of the animal body which are due to various kinds of external cause, that probably all the most largely fatal of them (impossible yet to say how many) represent but one single kind of cause, and respectively depend on invasions of the animal body by some rapidly self- multiplying form of alien life. This doctrine, which scientific experiment initiated, has, for the last dozen years, been extending and confirming itself by further experiment. As soon as the doctrine began to seem probable, science saw that, should it prove true, it must have the most important corollaries. If the cause of an infecting human disease is a self-multiplying germ from the outside world, the habits of that living enemy of ours can be studied in its outside relations. It becomes an object of common natural history, it has biological affinities and analogies. We can cultivate it in test-tubes in our laboratories, as the gardener would cultivate a rose or an apple, and we can see what agrees and what disagrees with its life. And then, as the next and immeasurably most important stage, where nothing but experi- A4