rather frequent in the distant centuries, and must not be taken too
seriously, since they come in times before men had learned to respect
one another's {402} opinions and to realize that the assertions of an
authority in science are only to be considered as worth the reasons he
advances for them. Most people will be quite ready to congratulate
themselves on the fact that our modern time has outlived this
unfortunate state of mind, which served to hamper scientific
investigation. They will probably even be quite self-complacent over
the supposed fact that, ever since the study of natural science was
taken up seriously at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth century, this unfortunate temper has disappeared. Those
who think so, however, know nothing of the history of nineteenth
century science, and especially not of nineteenth century medicine.
Jenner's great discovery of the value of vaccination against small-pox
came just before the nineteenth century opened. It met with the
bitterest kind of opposition. This was especially the case in England.
There is a doubt whether Germany did not eventually do more to bring
about the recognition of the immense value of Jenner's discovery than
his native England. Anyone who has read Jenner's life knows how much
he was made to suffer from the bitterness of opponents' expressions
with regard to him. [Footnote 46] It is true that he was eventually
rewarded quite liberally, and that honors were showered upon him, but
only after a preliminary series of trials that must have made him
regret, if possible, that he had ever devoted himself to the
propaganda of a great truth. Nor did the dawn of the vaunted
nineteenth century bring in a better state of affairs in this regard.
[Footnote 46: See my sketch of his life in Makers of Modern Medicine.
Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1907.]
It might perhaps be thought that this almost constant tendency to
oppose new developments in science was not recognized for what it
really is, the ultra-conservatism of human nature as men grow older,
until comparatively modern times. Anyone who knows some of the
intimate details of the history of medicine is sure to be better
informed in this matter, and to be well aware that, like Harvey, most
discoverers in medicine anticipated this opposition. Usually they have
had no experience of it before, but they realize from the way men
{403} think around them, and very probably also from their own prompt
reaction of opposition to whatever is novel, that men are sure to be
ready to oppose the introduction of whatever is new. One of the
quietest, gentlest and most lovable characters among the geniuses in
medicine was Auenbrugger, who, in Vienna, about 150 years ago,
discovered the method of percussion of the chest, which is so helpful
in the diagnosis of chest diseases. He perfected his discovery when he
was a young man of about 25. He did not publish it until he was nearly
40 years of age. Like Harvey, he waited nearly a score of years before
giving it to the world. The reason for the delay is given in the
preface in the following words:
"I foresee very well that I shall encounter no little opposition to
my views, and I put my invention before the public with that
anticipation. _I realize, however, that envy and blame and even
hatred and calumny have never failed to come to men who have
illuminated art or science by their discoveries or have added to
their perfection. I expect to have to submit to this danger myself,_
but I think that no one will be able to call any of my observations
to account. I have written only what I have myself learned by
personal observation over and over again, and what my senses have
taught me during long hours of work and toil. I have never permitted
myself to add or subtract anything from my observations because of
the seductions of preconceived theory."
Nearly fifty years after the publication of Auenbrugger's book,
Laennec completed the development of the diagnostic methods necessary
for the differentiation of chest diseases by the discovery of
auscultation. His was the greatest work ever done in clinical
medicine. The solution of the meaning of the multitude of sounds that
can be heard in the human chest required a genius for observation, and
almost infinite patience. Laennec spent twelve years at the task, and
then published his books on the subject. Practically nothing of
importance has been added to his methods and results in the more than
three-quarters of a century of active attention that has been given to
medicine since that time. Laennec did not expect that his discovery
would be taken up by his contemporaries. He even refers to the cool
reception which had been given to {404} Auenbrugger's work, and
deprecates the fact that a man who had done so much for mankind should
have met with such neglect and lack of appreciation, and even the
contempt of his colleagues in medicine, who could not bring themselves
to think that his method of "drumming on the chest," as they called
it, could ever mean much for the recognition of disease. [Footnote 47]
[Footnote 47: Makers of Modern Medicine, by James J. Walsh, M.D.,
Ph.D., LL.D. Fordham University Press, New York, 1907.]
In the preface of his book Laennec, like Auenbrugger, prophesies that
his work will not receive the attention that it deserves, and attempts
to lessen the effect of the derision that will be meted out to it by
calmly stating his expectation of it. It is curious that both of these
men, one of them a German and the other a Frenchman, one of them a
rather stolid Styrian, the other of the lively Celtic nature of the
Bretons, should in turn have realized, at a distance of a thousand
miles and more than half a century from one another, just what the
attitude of the men of science was to be toward their discoveries,
even though those are of a kind that were eventually to be hailed as
among the most important steps in medical progress ever made. Certain
words of Laennec's preface are an echo of Auenbrugger's expressions.
He said:
"For our generation is not inquisitive as to what is being
accomplished by its sons. Claims of new discoveries made by
contemporaries are likely, for the most part, to be met by smiles
and mocking remarks. It is always easier to condemn than to test by
actual experience."
Many people are accustomed to think that, after the spirit that came
into the world with the French Revolution, men were less prone to
listen to authority or cling to old-fashioned notions, and that
liberalism of mind is to be found written large on many pages of
nineteenth century scientific history. One of the great scientists of
the first part of the last century was Dr. Thomas Young, to whom we
owe so much with regard to the theory of light waves and the existence
of the ether to carry them. Men absolutely refused to listen to this
idea at all at the beginning, though now it is the {405} groundwork of
most of our thinking and of nearly all of our mathematical
demonstrations with regard to the movement of light. They not only
refused, however, but they expressed their scorn of the man who
invented such a cumbrous theory. Dr. George M. Gould, in one of the
volumes of his Biographic Clinics, has told the story of Dr. Young's
career, and I prefer to present it in his words rather than my own.
"A practicing physician, Young, as early as 1801, hit upon the true
theory of the luminiferous ether, and of light and color, which
nearly a century before had been discovered by Robert Hooke. But his
scientific contemporaries would not see it, and to avoid persecution
and deprivation of practice, Dr. Young was compelled to publish his
grand discoveries and papers anonymously. Published finally by the
Royal Society (one can imagine the editor's smile of superior wisdom
over such trash), they were as utterly ignored as were those of
Mitchell, Thompson and Martin as to eyestrain, two or three
generations later. Arago finally championed Dr. Young's theory in
the French Academy, but the leaders, LaPlace, Poissin, Biot, etc.,
denounced and conquered, and not until 1823 would the Academy allow
the publication of Fresnel's papers on the subject; in about
twenty-five years the silencers were themselves silenced. But Young
had been silenced too; his disgust was so great that he resigned
from the Royal Society, and devoted himself to his poor medical
practice and to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics." (In which, by
the way, as might be expected I suppose, he made a distinguished
name for himself.)
Many another important medical discoverer in the nineteenth century
found the truth of Auenbrugger's and Laennec's expressions, and met
the fate of Jenner and Young. Next to vaccination for small-pox,
probably the most important advance in nineteenth century medicine was
the discovery of the cause of puerperal fever, and the consequent
diminution of the death-rate from that very fatal disease. At one time
in the nineteenth century, it was much more dangerous for a woman to
have a child in a lying-in hospital in Europe than to go through an
attack of typhoid fever. The death-rate was at least 10 per cent. When
it was {406} reduced to five per cent, the hospital authorities felt
quite self-complacent about it. Shortly after the beginning of the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, there began to come
glimmerings of the real cause of the affection. It was not due to
something from within the patient, but was caused by a _materies
morbi_ introduced from without. Usually the physician in attendance
was responsible for the introduction of it. He came to these patients
after contact with septic cases of various kinds improperly cleansed.
The consequence was that he infected them, and puerperal fever was
contracted.
It would seem as though the medical profession would be very ready and
willing to test any such simple explanation of the origin of a serious
disease, and if possible secure its diminution. On the contrary, the
old men proved to be so wedded to the notion that the physician could
not possibly be the cause of this serious condition, that they were
very bitter in their denunciation of those who tried to introduce the
new idea. One distinguished old professor of midwifery declared very
superciliously that, of course, it was a very charming thing for a
young poet to insist on the notion that these serious diseases were
not associated necessarily with the beautiful function of maternity
itself, but were extraneous factors quite apart from it; but there was
no doubt, he declared, that the affection came from within, all the
same, and that the youthful poet's idea was only a pleasant fiction.
The poet in the case was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, needless to
say now, though he was laboring under the heinous crime of being a
young man, and did indulge in occasional poetry, he was entirely in
the right, and the distinguished old professor entirely in the wrong.
No little denunciation was heaped upon the devoted head of Holmes,
however, for his strenuous humanitarian work with regard to this
subject. It cost Holmes some of his medical friends and not a little
practice for some time. Even in America, then the land of the free,
there was a strong conservatism that made the introduction of new
ideas a very difficult and almost a dangerous thing.
The man who worked out the same idea to a practical {407} effect in
Europe met with even more determined opposition than did our own Dr.
Holmes. I refer, of course, to Semmelweiss, who, while teaching
obstetrics in Vienna, realized that it was the students and doctors
engaged in pathological work at the same time that they were taking
out their courses in obstetrics, who caused the havoc among the
patients in his (obstetrical) department in the hospital. The
death-rate in the hands of these obstetrical attendants, who came
directly to the lying-in department from their work in pathology, was
sometimes as high as one in five. Semmelweiss insisted that this state
of affairs must cease, and that while the students were doing the
pathological work they must not be allowed to attend obstetrical
cases. This at once raised a storm of opposition in the university.
Poor Semmelweiss lost his position as a consequence of it. In the
midst of the rancorous discussion that followed, Semmelweiss lost his
reason also for a time, and had to be cared for in an insane asylum.
It is well recognized that his beneficent discovery was for him the
cause of many years of unhappiness.
Nor must it be thought that it is only with regard to medical
discoveries that such opposition--bitter, personal, rancorous and
persecutory--can be aroused. While it might be thought that the great
minds in the ordinary natural sciences would have no reason for the
personal element which more or less necessarily enters into medical
discussion because men had been applying for gain the notions that now
are proved to be incorrect, and their reputations have been made on
such applications, to think that all was placid and quiet in the
physical sciences would be a serious mistake. Long ago Virgil asked in
a famous line, "Is it possible that there can be such great wrath in
divine minds?"--"_tantaene animae celestibus irae_"--and we might be
tempted to ask, can there be such foolish intolerance on the part of
scientific teachers? but the answer would be the same in each case.
Virgil found that the gods were very human in this respect, and anyone
who knows the history of science knows the scientists are like the
pagan dieties, when their conservative spirit is aroused, and when
they are up in arms, as they fondly think, to protect their beloved
science from foolish innovators.
{408}
A typical example of the sort of opposition which a modern discoverer
in science meets with is to be found in the life of Ohm, after whom,
because of his discovery of the law of electrical resistance, the unit
of resistance is called. When he made his discovery Ohm was working in
the Gymnasium at Cologne. The leading physicists of the day could not
bring themselves to believe that this comparatively young man--he was
scarcely forty at the time--could have made a discovery that went far
beyond their knowledge. His paper on the subject was discussed rather
coldly and without any recognition of the far-reaching significance of
the work that he had accomplished. A distinguished representative of
the University of Berlin criticised it severely. As the law was
advanced on mathematical as well as experimental grounds, the opinion
of the university authorities at Berlin was looked upon as extremely
important, since at the time mathematics was the _forte_ there. The
minister of education took his cue from the authorities at Berlin. Ohm
and his friends urged his appointment to a university position. This
was not only refused, but was rejected in such terms that Ohm offered
his resignation as a teacher. His resignation was accepted with
regrets by the ministry, but with a distinct expression that Ohm must
not expect other than a gymnasium position. The consequence of this
misunderstanding was that other teaching institutions in Germany would
not give him a place on their staff, because of the danger of
misunderstanding with the ministry of education. Ohm had to accept a
private tutorship in mathematics in Berlin and a few hours of teaching
in a military school, for which he was paid three hundred thalers a
year. This would be something over $200 in our money, though money was
worth, in buying power, probably two or three times as much as it is
at the present time. Six precious years of Ohm's life, at the very
acme of his powers as an investigator, were thus spent away from the
larger educational institutions and their opportunities for research,
because men would not accept the great discovery that he had made, and
could not be brought to understand that a genius might come along to
revolutionize all their thinking, though he did his work from an
obscure position, and practically attracted no attention {409} before
he found this wonderful clue to the maze of electrical science, which
meant so much for the elucidation of difficulties hitherto insoluble.
Always men find some excuse other than their own unwillingness to
confess that they were wrong. It is to this that they object, and not
the acceptance of the new truth. In the course of writing the
biographies of the Makers of Modern Medicine, published last year, and
the Makers of Electricity, which is now preparing for the press, one
fact proved to be very striking. It is that discoverers of really
great truths are practically always what we would call young men, and
what older men are apt to think of as scarcely more than mere boys.
Such men as Morgagni, the Father of Pathology; Laennec, the Father of
Pulmonary Diagnosis; Stokes, who taught us so much about the lungs;
and Corrigan, who laid the foundation of exact knowledge in heart
diseases,--were under twenty-five when they made their primal
discovery, and some of them scarcely more than twenty. Vesalius
published his great work on anatomy when he was not yet thirty, and
Stensen did his best work under twenty-five. When such men attempt to
teach their elders, of course they are properly put in their places by
their elders, and this often includes a good deal of bitter satire and
discouragement. It is the eternal conflict between youth and age that
constitutes the main reason for opposition to progress in any form of
knowledge, for youth will be progressive and age will be conservative.
Unfortunately age often dissembles the reasons for its opposition even
to itself, and religion and common sense and supposedly established
principles of science are all appealed to as contradicted by the new
doctrine introduced by young men, the truth of which their elders
cannot see.
Nor must it be thought that the second half of the nineteenth century
was free from this tendency to persecute those who made advances in
medicine. There is probably no form of treatment which, in the minds
of those who know most about the disease, that has done more to save
awful suffering in mankind than the Pasteur treatment for rabies.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the introduction of
that treatment will not be likely to forget how much of pain {410} and
suffering the discovery and introduction of it cost its author.
Nothing too bitter could be said by the medical profession of Germany
for many years after the treatment was first broached. One of the most
distinguished of German medical discoverers in the nineteenth century
said, in a very climax of satire, "that the distinguished Frenchman
deserved to be well known as one who treated diseases of which he knew
nothing by remedies of which he knew less." His good faith was
impugned, his statistics scorned, his results laughed at, even his
friends hesitated to say anything on the subject. Those who were close
to Pasteur know that he suffered, for his nature was of the most
sensitive, veritable torment because of this bitter opposition, which
at one time, because his French colleagues also were sceptical of his
treatment, threatened to impair the usefulness of our greatest
discoverer in nineteenth century medicine and leave him without that
support which would enable him to go on with his precious
investigation.
The more recent furore against antitoxin is still in many persons'
minds. Physicians who used it, and in whose cases serious results took
place, not the consequence of the antitoxin, but the consequence of
factors of the disease over which they had no control, sometimes
suffered seriously in their practice. All forms of opposition were
aroused against it. Even at the present time one still hears of the
crime, as some do not hesitate to call it, of injecting the serum of a
diseased animal into the veins of the human being, and above all a
little child. There are men (intelligent men!) who do not stop short
of tracing all sorts of disease incidents that happen after such an
injection, even many years later, to the evil effects of the horse
serum employed. Such people are exercising that superstitious fanatic
faculty which at all times has caused the obstinately conservative to
seek and find the most serious objections to any new doctrine,
careless of the consequences that they might bring on the discoverer
or the benefit they might prevent for the mass of humanity.
Originally vaccination was opposed by certain clergymen on the grounds
of theological objection to its use. At the present time most of such
objection has ceased, {411} It is still clergymen, however, who are
the most prominent among the anti-vaccinationists, though now they
usually find biological and pathological, instead of theological
reasons. They proclaim it a crime against nature, from the biological
standpoint, that the disease of an animal should be conveyed to man,
even for protective purposes. At the present time one can find just as
bitter objections to vaccination in anti-vaccination journals as when
the subject was first brought under discussion. Men must find some
reason for their opposition, and they take the weapon that is handiest
and that they are able to use with best effect. In an era when
theological ideas were dominant, theology was ready at hand for this
purpose, but any other ology will do just as well, and the history of
science, even in the present day, will show that always some ology,
regardless of human feelings, is used quite as ruthlessly and as
cruelly as in the olden days. There are tortures of spirit that are
worse than prison or even fire.
When we recall how few examples there are of opposition to science on
the part of ecclesiastics, and how most of these prove on careful
examination to be due to misunderstandings rather than to actual
desire to prevent the development of science, the stories of the way
in which discoveries in science were received in more modern times
become a striking lesson that makes us appreciate the broad-mindedness
and liberal policy of ecclesiastical educators in the olden time. They
were evidently much more ready to accept novel ideas, and much less
prone to set themselves up in opposition to them, than the educational
authorities of more modern times. This is the phase of the history of
education in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that
deserves the most careful study, and that should make modern educators
feel proud of their kinship with these old founders and patrons in
education, who at the same time furnish an example of liberality of
mind that it would be very beneficial to have in our modern supposedly
free universities.
For while we are prone to be proud of our academic freedom, we have
had more than one example in recent times of how dangerous it is for a
man, even though he may be recognized as an authority in his
department, {412} to treat certain economic questions from a
standpoint that is not favored by the rest of the faculty, or by the
Board of Governors, or, above all, by certain munificent patrons of
the particular educational institution. Much has been said about
religious educational institutions, about the middle of the nineteenth
century, so hampering the work of men in the physical sciences,
especially with regard to problems in geology and evolution, as to
nullify progress. Just this same thing, however, is true with regard
to many economic questions, because of the attitude of educational
interests with regard to free trade and protection, single tax, and
socialism and the like. No professor of science at a religious
institution ever felt himself more in the grip of old-fashioned
notions than do certain professors in departments of finance and
sociology with regard to problems that are now of the most profound
interest. Men have changed the reason for their conservatism, but the
conservatism itself remains, and apparently always will remain. This
is what must be realized when the stories of ecclesiastical opposition
to progress are told.
{413}
APPENDIX II.
Latin text of the Papal bulls and decrees which are given in English
in the body of this book. These documents are taken from Tomassetti's
Bullarium, except the decree of John XXII. with regard to alchemies,
which is taken from the Corpus Juris Canonici, Tome II., Lyons, 1779.
I.
Bull of Pope Boniface VIII. with regard to burials, which is supposed
to have been misconstrued into a prohibition of dissection.