Makers of Modern MedicineWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Makers of Modern Medicine
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Medicine -- Biography
For a time, in his younger years, Müller appears to have been not all
unaffected by the materialistic tendencies so rife in the science of
the time. His early anatomical investigations seem to have clouded
somewhat his faith in things spiritual. One of the expressions
attributed to him before his twenty-fifth year is that nothing exists
in the human being which cannot be discovered by the scalpel. It was
not long, however, before Müller repudiated this expression and came
back to a realization of the importance of the immaterial. Another
expression attributed to him, "Nemo psychologus, nisi physiologus,"
"No one can be a psychologist, unless he is a physiologist," has been
often repeated as if Müller meant it in an entirely materialist sense.
As a matter of fact, however, it is intended to convey only the idea
that no one can really exhaust the science of psychology unless he
knows the physiology of the brain, the organ which the mind uses in
its functions in this life. The expression is really the foundation of
the modern physiological psychology, which is by no means necessarily
materialistic in its tendency, and has become a favorite subject of
study even with those who appreciate thoroughly the importance of the
immaterial side of psychology.
Müller seems never to have gotten so far away from the Church as that
other great physiologist of the succeeding generation in France,
Claude Bernard, who for many years allowed himself to be swamped by
the wave of materialism {250} so likely to seem irresistible to a
scientist engaged in physiological researches. But, even Claude
Bernard came back to the Church before the end, and, under the
guidance of the great Dominican, Père Didon, reached the realization
that the only peace in the midst of the mysterious problem of life and
the question of a hereafter is to be found in a submissive faith of
the doctrines of Christianity.
Many years ago, when Virchow took it upon himself to say harsh words
in public of Catholic scholarship, and to put forward the hampering
influence of the Church on intellectual development as a reason for
not allowing Catholics to have any weight in educational matters, the
organ of the Catholics of Germany, _Germania_, reminded him that his
own teacher, the great Johann Müller, the acknowledged father of
modern German medicine, and the founder of the fecund scientific
method to which so many discoveries in the biological and medical
sciences are due, had been brought up and educated a Catholic, had
lived all the years of his productive scholarship and fruitful
investigation in her bosom, and had died as an acknowledged son of the
great mother Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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