2. The life and work of the men who made the original
contributions?
So far as concerns Science and Medicine, an attempt is
made to answer the question by the collection of a
Bibliotheca Prima, examples from which are here shown. The
idea is to have in a comparatively small number of works the
essential literature grouped about the men of the first rank,
arranged in chronological order.
I have put out the _editiones principes_ of twenty of such
works. The fundamental contribution may be represented
by a great Aldine edition, _e.g._ Aristotle, by the brief
communication such as that of Darwin and Wallace in the
Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1858, or by a three-page
pamphlet of Roentgen. From the card lists of Galen, Hippocrates,
Vesalius, and Harvey, those interested will see the aim and
scope of the collection.
The works on exhibition are:
Plato 1513
Hippocrates 1526
Aristotle 1495-98
Theophrastus 1483
Galen 1525
Dioscorides 1499
Celsus 1478
Plotinus 1492
Rhazes 1476
Avicenna 1486 (not ed. pr.)
Averrhoes 1473
Copernicus 1543
Vesalius 1543
Agricola 1556
Gilbert 1600
Bacon 1620
Galileo 1632
Harvey 1628
Descartes 1637
Newton 1687
Though it is hardly pertinent to this introductory note, the temptation
is strong to dwell further on the treasures of his library. These
mentioned above were but samples from the Bibliotheca Prima, and the
superb collection, with copious notes on each separate item, is further
subdivided into some seven sections--Bibliotheca Secunda, historica,
biographica, literaria, the incunabulas, and so on.
He was for seven years President of the Bibliographical Society and as
great a lover of books as of men, but it should be borne in mind that
his library was being collected and catalogued, not as a series of
treasures by reason of their rarity, but were regarded as instruments
for the advancement of knowledge, and with this end in view the
collection was bequeathed to McGill University.
By good fortune, letters which give interesting descriptions of the
effect of the address have been received from two distinguished members
of Sir William's audience, one of them an eminent classical scholar, the
other an eminent scientist. Sir Frederic Kenyon writes that:
The delivery of Sir William Osler's address was a very memorable
occasion. As can be seen by those who read it, it was full of
learning, of humour, of feeling, of eloquence, and it contained
suggestions of real weight with regard to the interconnection of
science and the humanities. But it gained much in delivery from
the personality of the speaker. No one could hear it without
being impressed by his width of outlook, by his easy mastery of
great tracts of literature and learning, by his all-embracing
humanity in the widest sense of the term. I hope it made many
students of science anxious to extend their knowledge of
classical literature; I know it made one student of the classics
wish that he had a wider knowledge of natural science. Osler
himself was a well-nigh perfect example of the union of science
and the humanities, which to some of us is the ideal of
educational progress; and his address embodied the whole spirit
of this ideal.
Professor William H. Welch has given the following account:
Most fortunately for me my last visit to the Oslers' in Oxford
happened to be on Friday, May 16, 1919, when Osler delivered his
presidential address before the Classical Association.
Of the many honours which came to Osler few gave him so great
pleasure, as well as surprise, as his election to the presidency
of the British Classical Association. This was a recognition,
not merely of his sympathetic interest in classical studies and
intimate association with classical scholars, but also of his
mastery of certain phases of the subject, especially the
bibliographical and historical sides, and the relation of the
work and thought of classical antiquity to the development of
medicine, science, and culture. There have been physicians,
especially in England, well known for their attainments as
classical scholars, but I am not aware that since Linacre there
has come to a member of the medical profession distinction in
this field comparable to Osler's election to the presidency of
the British Classical Association.
Osler told me that he had never given so much time and thought
to the preparation of an address as he did to this one.
The occasion and the whole setting were to me most interesting
and impressive. At noon the audience of distinguished scholars
and guests assembled in the "Divinity Room," the most
beautiful assembly room in Oxford. At one end of the hall the
Vice-Chancellor of the University presided and halfway down one
of the sides was the high seat of the orator. The distinguished
company, the brightly coloured academic gowns and hoods, the
traditional ceremonies for such an occasion in Oxford, the
figure of Osler himself, the charm and interest of the address
and its cordial appreciation and reception by the audience, all
combined to make a scene of brilliancy and delight which I shall
always carry in my memory.
At the close of the address the vote of thanks was moved by Sir
Herbert Warren, the President of Magdalen College, who described
Osler as the modern Galen, and was seconded by Sir John Barran,
the member of Parliament from Leeds, in felicitous words of
discriminating praise of the President's address. The audience
responded most enthusiastically.
I shall never forget the hour which I spent with Osler just
before the address, in inspecting the wonderful collection of
scientific instruments of historical interest which Mr. Gunther
had assembled at Osler's request from the various colleges at
Oxford, especially from Merton, the old home of science. An
interesting descriptive catalogue of the collection had been
prepared. With what delight Osler showed me and told me the
histories and associations of the astrolabes, armillary spheres,
orreries, telescopes, lenses, microscopes, books, etc., which he
had caused to be gathered together in connection with the
meeting of the Classical Association! You will recognize a
characteristic touch and thought of Osler in arranging for such
an original exhibit to interest a meeting of scholars.
When not long after the address I said good-bye to Osler I
little thought that it was to be our final parting, but I
rejoice to have been with him then and to remember him as I saw
him last on that triumphal day.
Thus, though from first to last his heart was wrapped up in his
profession and its science, his mind was open to other things, and his
confession that the _Religio Medici_ was the second book he ever
purchased and that the particular copy had always remained at his
bedside is not without significance. He lived to prove himself, not only
a worthy disciple of those scholars of the Renascence who interested
themselves in natural philosophy, but also of those who were devotees of
the ancient languages and literature. But Sir William Osler was a man
first--a physician and scholar afterward; and beneath his high spirits,
his love of fun, lay an infinite compassion and tenderness toward his
humankind. "Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." And upon few men
has such a measure of admiration, affection, and love been bestowed in
return. These things he bore without pride, as he bore his great success
in life with humility.
On July 12, 1919, less than two months after the address was delivered,
he attained his seventieth year, and was presented with two volumes
containing sixty-seven original "Contributions to Medical and Biological
Research" written in his honour. In addition to this, tributes were
showered upon him from all sides, and his work, character, and
accomplishments became the subject of papers innumerable. It was an
extraordinary outburst, one of those exceptional occurrences when people
do not wait for the passing--in this case so near at hand--to say, what
is in their hearts to say, of the life of a friend. A brief
characterization of him from one of the most eminent of British scholars
was quoted early in this note, and it may be fitting to close with some
lines by the dean of American classical scholars, Basil L. Gildersleeve,
written for what proved to be his last birthday:
ON A PORTRAIT OF SIR WILLIAM
OSLER, BART.
William the Fowler, Guillaume l'Oiseleur!
I love to call him thus, and when I scan
The counterfeit presentment of the man,
I feel his net, I hear his arrows whir.
Make at the homely surname no demur,
Nor on a nomination lay a ban
With which a line of sovran lords began,
Henry the Fowler was first Emperor.
Asclepius was Apollo's chosen son,
But to that son he never lent his bow,
Nor did Hephæstus teach to forge his net;
Both secrets hath Imperial Osler won.
His winged words straight to their quarry go.
All hearts are holden by his meshes yet.
HARVEY CUSHING
_Brookline_
_February 18, 1920_
THE OLD HUMANITIES AND
THE NEW SCIENCE
THE OLD HUMANITIES AND
THE NEW SCIENCE
I
Early in the sixteenth century a literary joke sent inextinguishable
laughter through the learned circles of Europe. The _Epistolæ Obscurorum
Virorum_ is great literature, to which I refer for two reasons--its
standard is an exact gauge of my scholarship, and had _Magister
Nostrandus Ortuinus Gratius_ of Cologne, to whom most of the letters are
addressed, been asked to join that wicked Erfurt Circle, he could not
have been more surprised than I was to receive a gracious invitation to
preside over this gathering of British scholars. I felt to have been
sailing under false colours to have ever, by pen or tongue, suggested
the possession of even the traditional small Latin and less Greek.
Relieved by the assurance that in alternate years the qualification of
your President was an interest in education and literature, I gladly
accepted, not, however, without such anticipatory qualms as afflict an
amateur at the thought of addressing a body of experts. Not an educated
man in the Oxford sense, yet faint memories of the classics linger--the
result of ten years of such study as lads of my generation pursued,
memories best expressed in Tom Hood's lines:
"The weary tasks I used to con!
The hopeless leaves I wept upon!
Most fruitless leaves to me!"
In a life of teaching and practice, a mere picker-up of learning's
crumbs is made to realize the value of the humanities in science not
less than in general culture.
To have a Professor of Medicine in this Chair gives to the Oxford
meeting an appropriate renaissance--shall we say mediæval?--flavour, and
one may be pardoned the regret that the meeting is not being held in
May, 1519, to have had the pleasure of listening to an address from a
real Oxford scholar-physician, an early teacher of Greek in this
University, and the founder of the Royal College of Physicians, whose
_Rudimenta Grammatices_ and _De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis_
upheld for a generation, on the Continent at least, the reputation of
English scholarship. These noble walls, themselves an audience--indeed,
most appreciative of audiences--have storied memories of Linacre's
voice, and the basis of the keen judgment of Erasmus may have been
formed by intercourse with him in this very school. In those happy days,
to know Hippocrates and Galen was to know disease and to be qualified to
practise; and my profession looks back in grateful admiration to such
great medical humanists as Linacre and Caius and Rabelais. Nor can I
claim to speak for pure science, some salt of which remains from early
association, and from a lifelong attempt to correlate with art a science
which makes medicine, I was going to say the only--but it is more civil
to say the most--progressive of the learned professions.
To have lived right through an epoch, matched only by two in the story
of the race, to have shared in its long struggle, to have witnessed its
final victory (and in my own case, to be left I trust with wit enough to
realize its significance)--to have done this has been a wonderful
privilege. To have outgrown age-old theories of man and of nature, to
have seen west separated from east in the tangled skein of human
thought, to have lived in a world re-making--these are among the thrills
and triumphs of the Victorian of my generation. To a childhood and youth
came echoes of the controversy that Aristarchus began, Copernicus
continued, and Darwin ended, that put the microcosm into line with the
macrocosm, and for the golden age of Eden substituted the _tellus dura_
of Lucretius. Think of the Cimmerian darkness out of which our
generation has, at any rate, blazed a path! Picture the mental state of
a community which could produce "Omphalos: An Attempt to untie the
Geological Knot"![1] I heard warm clerical discussions on its main
thesis, that the fossils were put into the earth's strata to test men's
faith in the Mosaic account of the creation, and our Professor of
Natural Theology lectured seriously upon it! The intellectual unrest of
those days wrapped many in that "dyvine cloude of unknowynge," by which
happy phrase Brother Herp designates mediæval mysticism; and not a bad
thing for a young man to live through, as sufficient infection usually
remains to enable him to understand, if not to sympathize with, mental
states alien or even hostile.
[1] By the distinguished naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.
An Age of Force followed the final subjugation of Nature. The dynamo
replaced the steam-engine, radiant energy revealed the hidden secrets of
matter, to the conquest of the earth was added the control of the air
and the mastery of the deep. Nor was it only an Age of Force. Never
before had man done so much for his brother, the victory over the powers
of Nature meant also glorious victories of peace; pestilences were
checked, the cry of the poor became articulate, and to help the life of
the submerged half became a sacred duty of the other. How full we were
of the pride of life! In 1910 at Edinburgh I ended an address on "Man's
Redemption of Man" with the well-known lines of Shelley beginning,
"Happiness and Science dawn though late upon the earth." And now, having
survived the greatest war in history, and a great victory, with the
wreckage of mediæval autonomy to clear up, our fears are lest we may
fail to control the fretful forces of Caliban, and our hopes are to
rebuild Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.
Never before in its long evolution has the race realized its full
capacity. Our fathers have told us, and we ourselves have known, of
glorious sacrifices; but the past four years have exhausted in every
direction the possibilities of human effort. And, as usual, among the
nations the chief burden has fallen on that weary Titan, the Motherland,
"Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load
Well-nigh not to be borne
Of the too vast orb of her fate."
Not alone did she furnish the sinews of war, but she developed a spirit
that made defeat impossible.
No wonder war has advocates, to plead the heroic clash of ideals, the
purging of a nation's dross in the fire of suffering and sacrifice, and
the welding in one great purpose of a scattered people. Even Montaigne,
sanest of men, called it "the greatest and most magnificent of human
actions"; and the glamours of its pride, pomp, and circumstance still
captivate. But there are other sides which we should face without
shrinking. Why dwell on the horrors such as we doctors and nurses have
had to see? Enough to say that war blasts the soul, and in this great
conflict the finer sense of humanity has been shocked to paralysis by
the helplessness of our civilization and the futility of our religion to
stem a wave of primitive barbarism. Black as are the written and
unwritten pages of history, the concentrated and prolonged martyrdom
surpasses anything man has yet had to endure. What a shock to the proud
and mealy-mouthed Victorian who had begun to trust that Love was
creation's final law, forgetting that Egypt and Babylon are our
contemporaries and of yesterday in comparison with the hundreds of
thousands of years since the cave-dwellers left their records on walls
and bones. In the mystic shadow of the Golden Bough, and swayed by the
emotions of our savage ancestors, we stand aghast at the revelation of
the depth and ferocity of primal passions which reveal the
unchangeableness of human nature.
When the wild beast of Plato's dream becomes a waking reality, and a
herd-emotion of hate sweeps a nation off its feet, the desolation that
follows is wider than that in France and Belgium, wider even than the
desolation of grief, and something worse--the hardened heart, the lie in
the soul--so graphically described in Book II of the "Republic"--that
forces us to do accursed things, and even to defend them! I refer to it
because, as professors, we have been accused of sinning against the
light. Of course we have. Over us, too, the wave swept, but I protest
against the selection of us for special blame. The other day, in an
address on "The Comradeship of Letters" at Turin, President Wilson is
reported to have said: "It is one of the great griefs of this war that
the universities of the Central Empires used the thoughts of science to
destroy mankind; it is the duty of the universities of these states to
redeem science from this disgrace and to show that the pulse of humanity
beats in the classroom, and that there are sought out not the secrets of
death but the secrets of life." A pious and worthy wish! But once in war
a nation mobilizes every energy, and to say that science has been
prostituted in discovering means of butchery is to misunderstand the
situation. Slaughter, wholesale and unrestricted, is what is sought, and
to accomplish this the discoveries of the sainted Faraday and of the
gentle Dalton are utilized to the full, and to their several nations
scientific men render this service freely, if not gladly. That the
mental attitude engendered by science is apt to lead to a gross
materialism is a vulgar error. Scientific men, in mufti or in uniform,
are not more brutal than their fellows, and the utilization of their
discoveries in warfare should not be a greater reproach to them than is
our joyous acceptance of their success.
What a change of heart after the appalling experience of the first
gassing in 1915! Nothing more piteously horrible than the sufferings of
the victims has ever been seen in warfare.[2] Surely we could not sink
to such barbarity! Is thy servant a dog? But martial expediency soon
compelled the Allies to enlist the resources of chemistry; the
instruction of our enemies was soon bettered, and before the Armistice
there were developments in technique and destructive force that would
have delighted Nisroch, who first invented aerial "machinations to
plague the sons of men." A group of medical men representing the chief
universities and medical bodies of the United Kingdom was innocent
enough to suggest that such an unclean weapon--the use of lethal gases,
"condemning its victims to death by long-drawn-out torture," and with
infinite possibilities for its further development--should be forever
abolished. "Steeped in folly by theories and prepossessions," failure to
read the "lessons of war which should have sufficed to convince a
beetle"--such were among the newspaper comments; and in other ways we
were given to understand that our interference in such matters was most
untimely. All the same, it is gratifying to see that the suggestion has
been adopted at the Peace Congress.
[2] I am sorry to have seen Sargent's picture "Gassed" in this
year's Academy. It haunts the mind like a nightmare.
With what a howl of righteous indignation the slaughter of our innocent
women and children by the bombing of open towns was received! It was a
dirty and bloody business, worthy of the Oxydracians by means of
Levin-bolts and Thunders and more horrible, more frightful, more
diabolical, maiming, breaking, tearing, and slaying more folk and
confounding men's senses and throwing down more walls than would a
hundred thunderbolts.[3]
[3] Rabelais, Book IV, ch. LXI.
Against reprisals there was at first a strong feeling. Early in 1916 I
wrote to the "Times": "The cry for reprisals illustrates the exquisitely
hellish state of mind into which war plunges even sensible men. Not a
pacifist, but a 'last-ditcher,' yet I refuse to believe that as a
nation, how bitter soever the provocation, we shall stain our hands in
the blood of the innocent. In this matter let us be free from
bloodguiltiness, and let not the undying reproach of humanity rest on us
as on the Germans." Two years changed me into an ordinary barbarian. A
detailed tally of civilians killed by our airmen has not, I believe,
been published, but the total figures quoted are not far behind the
German.
Could a poll have been taken a week before the Armistice as to the moral
justification of the bombing of Berlin--for which we were ready--how we
should have howled at the proposer of any doubt! And many Jonahs were
displeased that a city greater than Nineveh, with more than the
threescore and ten thousand who knew not the right hand from the left,
had been spared. We may deplore the necessity and lament, as did a
certain great personage:
"... Yet public reason just--
Honour and empire with revenge enlarged
... compels me now
To do what else, though damned, I should abhor."
All the same, we considered ourselves "Christians of the best edition,
all picked and culled," and the churches remained open, prayers rose to
Jehovah, many of whose priests--even his bishops!--were in khaki, and
quit themselves like men--yes, and scores died the death of heroes! Into
such hells of inconsistency does war plunge the best of us!
Learning--new or old--seems a vain thing to save a nation, but possibly,
as a set-off, science, as represented by cellulose and sulphuric acid,
may yet prove the best bulwark of civilization! In his "History of the
Origin of Medicine,"[4] Lettsom maintains that the invention of firearms
has done more to prevent the destruction of the human species than any
other discovery; he says: "Invention and discernment of mind have made
it possible to reverse the ancient maxim that strength has always
prevailed over wisdom." Science alone may prevent a repetition of the
story of Egypt, of Babylonia, of Greece, and of Rome. The suggestion
seems brazen effrontery when we have not even given the world the
equivalent of the _Pax Romana_! Ah! what a picture of self-satisfied
happiness in Plutarch! One envies that placid life in the midst of the
only great peace the world has known, spanning a period of more than two
hundred years. And he could say, "No tumults, no civil sedition, no
tyrannies, no pestilences nor calamities depopulating Greece, no
epidemic disease needing powerful and choice drugs and medicines";
though as a Delphic priest there is a pathetic lament that the Pythian
priestess has now only commonplace questions to deal with.[5] Surely
those cultivated men of his circle must have felt that their house could
never be removed. Has Science reached such control over Nature that she
will enable our civilization to escape the law of the Ephesian, written
on all known records--_panta rei_? Perhaps so, now that material
civilization is world-wide; cataclysmic forces, powerful enough in
centres of origin, may weaken as they pass out in circles. Let this be
our hope in the present crisis. At any rate, in the free democracies in
which Demos with safety says "_L'État c'est moi_," it has yet to be
determined whether Science, as the embodiment of a mechanical force, can
rule without invoking ruin. Two things are clear: there must be a very
different civilization or there will be no civilization at all; and the
other is that neither the old religion combined with the old learning,
nor both with the new science, suffice to save a nation bent on
self-destruction. The suicide of Germany, the outstanding fact of the
war, followed an outburst of national megalomania. For she had
religion--it may shock some of you to hear! I mean the people, not the
writers or the thinkers, but the people for whom Luther lived and Huss
died. Of the two devotional ceremonies which stand supreme in my memory,
one was a service in the Dom, Berlin, in which "not the great nor well
bespoke, but the mere uncounted folk" sang Luther's great hymn "_Ein'
feste Burg ist unser Gott._"[6] With the Humanities Germany never broke,
and the proportion of students in her schools and universities who
studied Greek and Latin has been higher than in any other country. You
know better than I the innumerable classical studies of her scholars. In
classical learning relating to science and medicine she simply had the
field; for one scholar in other countries she had a dozen, and the
monopoly of journals relating to the history of these subjects. And she
had science, and led the world in the application of the products of the
laboratory to the uses of every-day life--in commerce, in the arts, and
in war. Withal, like Jeshurun, she waxed fat; and did ever such pride go
before such destruction? What a tragedy that the successors of Virchow
and Traube and Helmholtz and Billroth should have made her a byword
among the nations! "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds!"
[4] 1778, p. 30.
[5] "Why the Pythian Priestess," etc. (Plutarch's _Morals_, vol.
III, p. 100, Goodwin's edition).
[6] And the other, how different! The crowded Blue Mosque of
Cairo, and the crowded streets with the thousands of
kneeling Moslems awaiting the cry of the muezzin from the
tower.