Just how much of present promise is tentative, just what are the limits of the methods--these are questions for the future to decide. But, in any event, there seems little question that the serum treatment will stand as the culminating achievement in therapeutics of our century. It is the logical outgrowth of those experimental studies with the microscope begun by our predecessors of the thirties, and it represents the present culmination of the rigidly experimental method which has brought medicine from a level of fanciful empiricism to the plane of a rational experimental science. IX. THE NEW SCIENCE OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY BRAIN AND MIND A little over a hundred years ago a reform movement was afoot in the world in the interests of the insane. As was fitting, the movement showed itself first in America, where these unfortunates were humanely cared for at a time when their treatment elsewhere was worse than brutal; but England and France quickly fell into line. The leader on this side of the water was the famous Philadelphian, Dr. Benjamin Rush, "the Sydenham of America"; in England, Dr. William Tuke inaugurated the movement; and in France, Dr. Philippe Pinel, single-handed, led the way. Moved by a common spirit, though acting quite independently, these men raised a revolt against the traditional custom which, spurning the insane as demon-haunted outcasts, had condemned these unfortunates to dungeons, chains, and the lash. Hitherto few people had thought it other than the natural course of events that the "maniac" should be thrust into a dungeon, and perhaps chained to the wall with the aid of an iron band riveted permanently about his neck or waist. Many an unfortunate, thus manacled, was held to the narrow limits of his chain for years together in a cell to which full daylight never penetrated; sometimes--iron being expensive--the chain was so short that the wretched victim could not rise to the upright posture or even shift his position upon his squalid pallet of straw.