Let us then blush, in this so ample and so wonderful field of nature (where performance still exceeds what is promised), to credit other men's traditions only, and thence come uncertain problems to spin out thorny and captious questions. Nature herselfe must be our adviser; the path she chalks must be our walk; for so while we confer with our own eies, and take our rise from meaner things to higher, we shall at length be received into her closet-secrets. --Preface to _Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures_, 1653. William Harvey. {29} MORGAGNI, THE FATHER OF PATHOLOGY. "VIR INGENII, MEMORIAE, STUDII, INCOMPARABILIS." --HALLER. In 1894, when the International Medical Congress met at Rome, Prof. Virchow of Berlin, the greatest living pathologist at the time, was asked to deliver the principal address. He chose as his subject John Baptist Morgagni, the distinguished Italian physician and original investigator of the eighteenth century, whom he hailed as the Father of Pathology. No medical scientist of the nineteenth century was in a better position than Virchow to judge who had been the founder of the science for which he himself did so much. Virchow besides, through long and faithful study of the history of medicine, knew well whereof he spoke. In pathology especially modern medicine has made its sure advances, so that Morgagni's ground-breaking work may well be considered the beginning of the most recent epoch in medical science. As a matter of fact, medicine lost much of its obscurity by losing all its vagueness when Morgagni's methods came into general use. As a medical student scarcely twenty years of age, he revolutionized medical observation by studying his fatal cases with a comparative investigation of their clinical symptoms and the postmortem findings. This had been done before, but mainly with the idea of finding out the cause of death and the principal reasons for the illness which {30} preceded. Morgagni's investigations in pathology consisted in tracing side by side all the clinical symptoms to their causes as far as that might be possible. This looks so simple now as to be quite obvious, as all great discoveries are both simple and obvious once they have been made; but it takes a genius to make them, since their very nearness causes them to be overlooked by the ordinary observer so prone to seek something strange and different from the common. How much Morgagni's studies from this new viewpoint of the investigation of all the symptoms of disease has meant for modern medicine, may be best appreciated by a quotation from an address delivered before the Glasgow Pathological and Clinical Society in 1864, by Professor Gairdner, who thus tersely describes the character of the distinguished Italian pathologist's work: