The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913Osler, William, Sir
History
The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913
Osler, William, Sir
Medicine -- History
There is perhaps no more fascinating story in the history of science
than that of the discovery of these so-called ductless glands. Part
of its special interest is due to the fact that clinicians, surgeons,
experimental physiologists, pathologists and chemists have all combined
in splendid teamwork to win the victory. No such miracles have ever
before been wrought by physicians as those which we see in connection
with the internal secretion of the thyroid gland. The myth of bringing
the dead back to life has been associated with the names of many great
healers since the incident of Empedocles and Pantheia, but nowadays the
dead in mind and the deformed in body may be restored by the touch
of the magic wand of science. The study of the interaction of these
internal secretions, their influence upon development, upon mental
process and upon disorders of metabolism is likely to prove in the
future of a benefit scarcely less remarkable than that which we have
traced in the infectious diseases.
CHEMISTRY
IT is not making too strong a statement to say that the chemistry and
chemical physics of the nineteenth century have revolutionized
the world. It is difficult to realize that Liebig's famous Giessen
laboratory, the first to be opened to students for practical study, was
founded in the year 1825. Boyle, Cavendish, Priestley, Lavoisier, Black,
Dalton and others had laid a broad foundation, and Young, Frauenhofer,
Rumford, Davy, Joule, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Helmholtz and others
built upon that and gave us the new physics and made possible our age
of electricity. New technique and new methods have given a powerful
stimulus to the study of the chemical changes that take place in the
body, which, only a few years ago, were matters largely of speculation.
"Now," in the words of Professor Lee, "we recognize that, with its
living and its non-living substances inextricably intermingled, the
body constitutes an intensive chemical laboratory in which there is ever
occurring a vast congeries of chemical reactions; both constructive and
destructive processes go on; new protoplasm takes the place of old. We
can analyze the income of the body and we can analyze its output, and
from these data we can learn much concerning the body's chemistry. A
great improvement in the method of such work has recently been secured
by the device of inclosing the person who is the subject of the
experiment in a respiration calorimeter. This is an air-tight chamber,
artificially supplied with a constant stream of pure air, and from which
the expired air, laden with the products of respiration, is withdrawn
for purposes of analysis. The subject may remain in the chamber for
days, the composition of all food and all excrete being determined, and
all heat that is given off being measured. Favorable conditions are
thus established for an exact study of many problems of nutrition. The
difficulties increase when we attempt to trace the successive steps in
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