The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913 — John Shaqi
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
In every age, and in every religion there has been justification for
his bitter words, "tantum religio potuit suadere malorum"--"Such wrongs
Religion in her train doth bring"--yet, one outcome of "a belief in
spiritual beings"--as Tylor defines religion--has been that man has
built an altar of righteousness in his heart. The comparative method
applied to the study of his religious growth has shown how man's
thoughts have widened in the unceasing purpose which runs through his
spiritual no less than his physical evolution. Out of the spiritual
protoplasm of magic have evolved philosopher and physician, as well
as priest. Magic and religion control the uncharted sphere--the
supernatural, the superhuman: science seeks to know the world, and
through knowing, to control it. Ray Lankester remarks that Man is
Nature's rebel, and goes on to say: "The mental qualities which have
developed in Man, though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition
in some of his animal associates, are of such an unprecedented power and
so far dominate everything else in his activities as a living organism,
that they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from
the general operation of that process of Natural Selection and survival
of the fittest which up to their appearance had been the law of the
living world. They justify the view that Man forms a new departure in
the gradual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason,
self-consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man."(1) It has been
a slow and gradual growth, and not until within the past century has
science organized knowledge--so searched out the secrets of Nature, as
to control her powers, limit her scope and transform her energies. The
victory is so recent that the mental attitude of the race is not yet
adapted to the change. A large proportion of our fellow creatures still
regard nature as a playground for demons and spirits to be exorcised or
invoked.
(1) Sir E. Ray Lankester: Romanes Lecture, "Nature and Man,"
Oxford Univ. Press, 1905, p. 21.
Side by side, as substance and shadow--"in the dark backward and abysm
of time," in the dawn of the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon,
in the bright morning of Greece, and in the full noontide of modern
life, together have grown up these two diametrically opposite views of
man's relation to nature, and more particularly of his personal relation
to the agencies of disease.
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