The list of wanton omissions is not yet complete! C. S. Minot, the great
American embryologist, is ignored. Theobald Smith, the pathologist,
is also thought unworthy of note. And among those renowned American
scientists who, though mentioned, failed to impress the Encyclopædia’s
English editor sufficiently to be given biographies are: John Kerasley
Mitchell, who was the first to describe certain neurological conditions,
and was one of the advocates of the germ theory of disease before
bacteriology; William Beaumont, the first to study digestion _in situ_;
Jacques Loeb, whose works on heliotropism, morphology, psychology, etc.,
have placed him among the world’s foremost imaginative researchers; H.
S. Jennings, another great American biologist; W. H. Welch, one of the
greatest of modern pathologists and bacteriologists; and Simon Flexner,
whose work is too well known to the world to need any description here.
These men unquestionably deserve biographies in any encyclopædia which
makes even a slight pretence of completeness, and to have omitted them
from the _Britannica_ was an indefensible oversight—or worse.
The editors of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ cannot explain away
these amazing omissions on the ground that the men mentioned are
not of sufficient importance to have come within the range of their
consideration; for, when we look down the list of _British_ medical
scientists who are given biographies, we can find at least a score of
far less important ones. For instance, Elizabeth G. Anderson, whose
claim to glory lies in her advocacy of admitting women into the medical
profession, is given considerably over half a column. Gilbert Blane, the
introducer of lime-juice into the English navy, also has a biography.
So has Richard Brocklesby, an eighteenth-century army physician; and
Andrew Clark, a fashionable London practitioner; and T. B. Curling; and
John Elliotson, the English mesmerist; and Joseph Fayrer, known chiefly
for his studies in the poisonous snakes of India; and J. C. Forster; and
James Clark, an army surgeon and physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria;
and P. G. Hewett, another surgeon to Queen Victoria; and many others of
no more prominence or importance.
In order to realize the astounding lengths of injustice to which the
_Britannica_ has gone in its petty neglect of America, compare these
English names which are given detailed biographical consideration, with
the American names which are left out. The editors of this encyclopædia
must either plead guilty to the most flagrant kind of prejudicial
discrimination against this country, or else confess to an abysmal
ignorance of the history and achievements of modern science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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