the fact that Pare was most happy in selecting the time of his birth and that he enjoyed the indispensable advantage of an almost life-long position as army surgeon in the war. In spite of these advantages his lack of education must have proven a serious thorn in the flesh, for we are told that he was decried by the literati of his day as an ignorant upstart and a plagiarist.

In the 17th century medicine was placed on a scientific basis by the discovery of the circulation of the blood and the proof of the development of the higher animals from the egg; both made by one man, William Harvey, who lived from 1578 to 1651. After graduating at Cambridge, Harvey traveled through France and Germany and at twenty-one went to Padua to study medicine. Five years later he took his degree here and went to London to practice his profession.

He was appointed physician to St. Bartholomew's Hos pital and later was made professor of surgery and anatomy in the college of physicians and surgeons, where in 1616 he first developed his discovery of the circulation of the blood as it is held to-day. He was a busy practitioner until by the publication of his doctrines in 1628; he lost a great part of his practice; few doctrines have met with greater opposition. In spite of all this he continued his investigations and in 1651 published his work on generation, entitled Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium.

We next meet with Thomas Sydenham, "the father of Rational Medicine," a man whose name alone would render the statement century illustrious. He lived from 1624 to 1689, after graduating at Oxford he went to Montpelier to study medicine. He practiced in London.

He would have all mere hypothesis set aside and this at a time when the mania of hypothesis was at its height and the practical part of his art was over-run and stultified by vile and silly nostrums. First he would make medicine observational, then the histories of diseases written and classified. For he argues, "if only one person in every age had accurately described and consistently cured but a single disease and made known his secret, physic would not be where it is now," etc.

In marked contrast to the cultured Sydenham, appears that great surgeon, John Hunter, 1728to1793. His education was much neglected, his manners coarse and his speech

rude. "They wanted to make an old woman of me; or that I should stuff Latin and Greek at the University;" but added he, significantly pressing his thum-nail on the table, "these schemes I cracked as so many vermin as they came along."

His brother, Dr. William Hunter needed an assistant in his anatomical school in London and sent for his younger brother. And so began the medical education of John Hunter. He became not only one of the most profound anatomists of the age in which he lived, but by the common consent of his successors one of the greatest men who ever practiced surgery. As a lecturer, he was a failure. His want of education, indifferent as he seems to have been upon the matter, was here severely felt and he appeared in powerful contrast to his eloquent brother. His lack of education hampered him also in his writings. Before venturing to publish his works, they were submitted to the revision of some of his medical friends, in order that they might appear in as correct a form as possible.

The next great benefactor of mankind was Edward Jenner, "The Father of Vaccination;" he was born in Gloucestershire, England, where he spent the most of his life, 1749 to 1823. Jenner attained a respectable proficiency in the classics and early developed a taste for natural history. He did not have a university education. He spent two years in London in the family and as the pupil of John Hunter.

During his term of apprenticeship, he received from a milk-maid who had had cow-pox, the information of the protective power of this disease against small-pox, as established by popular observation. The thought of the immense importance of such protection for the whole human race, never there-after left his mind.

L

We now meet with the most short-lived of this group of "the World's Worthies in Medicine," Marie Francis Xavier Bichat, 1771 to 1802. He was distinguished as a university student. As a physiologist, the foundation of his work was the division of the life of an animal, into organic and animal life. These have their seats in the ganglion and in the brain. Bichat was appointed physician to the Hotel-Dieu in 1800. He is said to have examined upwards of six hundred bodies during one winter; thereby greatly increasing his store of pathological information. He also paid some

attention to Materia Medica. He died as the result of an accident and overwork in the thirty-first year of his age.

Again it is a Frenchman who renders an immortal service to medicine, by his invention of the stethoscope. The inventor was Rene Theodore Hyacinthe Laennec, 1781 to 1826. He was well educated and had the benefits of hospital and camp instruction.

Direct auscultation was not unknown to Hippocrates and had been practiced to some slight extent by his successors; but Laennec may claim the honor of discovering a more convenient method of introducing it into general use and of establishing its great importance in practice.

The medical profession can only claim by adoption, the next great star, Louis Pasteur, a man who was by profession a chemist and whose only medical title is that of honorary membership in an Academy of Medicine. He was born in 1822. Three years after graduating with great honor at Besancon, he won a place in l'Ecole Normale at Paris, where almost all of his work has been done and of which he has become the chief glory.

The discovery of the great principle of the attenuation of virus, the reduction of the virulence of the microbe to a point at which inoculation with it will not kill and yet will confer immunity against a subsequent attack, was the crowning work of Pasteur's life. It was made like all his others not by chance, but by prolonged search with this definite object in view.

Jenner's vaccination against small-pox was the shrewd application of a chance observation of a certain relation between two existing diseases. Pasteur's discovery of the attenuation of a virus and conferring immunity thereby was effected by long continued, intelligent experimentation guided by wide observation and profound thought. The former was the brilliant utilization of a fact that had already been discovered by others; the latter was the original discovery of a principle.

In science Pasteur has laid at rest the theory of spontan eous generation which for centuries had blinded and misled and in its place he has given us a new world of the infinitely small. In medicine he has given us the science of bacteriology; he laid the foundations for anti-septic surgery; he

demonstrated the microbic nature of certain diseases and he gave us the principle of protection by an attenuated virus. and he has himself applied that principle in hydrophobia.

A man the richer for Pasteur's works was the famous English surgeon, Sir Joseph Lister, Bart. who was born in 1847. He graduated in both the academical and medical departments of the University of London. From the study of the experimental researches of Pasteur, into the causes of putrefaction, Lister stated that the evils observed in open wounds were due to the admission into them of organisms which exist in the air, in water, on instruments, sponges, the hand of the operator, etc. Having accepted the germ theory of putrefaction, he applied himself to discoyer the best way of preventing these oganisms from reaching the wound from the moment it was made until healed. This introduction of anti-sepsis by Lister revolutioned operative surgery.

The last two great lights in this brilliant galaxy of fixed stars are Germans. First to appear in point of time was Rudolph Vichow, "The Intellectual Father of the School of Natural Sciences.' He was born in 1821. He is a gifted scholar and has been a paragon of industry. He was the founder of cellular pathology. To fix the disease in a cell or in a group of cells, is the finest localization possible. The physician of to-day enjoys not only the benefits of diagnosis and prognosis based upon the knowledge of local organic alterations, but the important changes in therapeutics which have accompanied this. Virchow has been foremost in raising medicine to the dignity of a science, by purely scientific methods.

A compatriot and cotemporary of Virchow is Robert Koch, the discoverer of the bacilli of tuberculosis. He was born in 1843. If the seriousness of a malady be measured by the number of its victims, then the most dreaded pests which have hitherto ravaged the world, plague and cholera included, must stand far behind the one now under consideration. Since one-seventh of the deaths of the human race are due to tubercular disease. In 1882 Koch isolated the tubercular bacillus by which the disease is communicated. In 1883 he discovered the cholera bacillus.

(Continued in next month's issue.)

TO CONTRIBUTORS AND SUBSCRIBERS.

The JOURNAL will be pleased to receive Short Practical Communications on topics of interest. The JOURNAL will be glad to publish papers read at the various medical meetings. Reports of proceedings of all Woman's Medical Clubs are requested.

The Editors and publishers are not responsible for the views of contributors. REPRINTS-Contributors desiring reprints should notify us when copy is sent. as to number desired. Seventy-five will be furnished gratis to those desiring them.

If you receive a copy of the Journal and have not yet subscribed for it please consider it a courteous invitation to send in your subscription We need you, and you need the Journal.

at once.

“L

EDITORIAL.

IFE is full of beginnings" has been truly saidand the larger life of woman as exemplified by the record of woman's progress during the last fifty years, has certainly been a verification of this truism. Step by step women have steadily advanced, from a condition of servitude to where they stand, side by side, in thought and action, with the men of achievement. The years of inaction and apathy seem to have in no way impaired the natural ability of woman to make for herself a distinct place, and to most ably fill positions in life deemed only accessible to men.

In science, in the professions, in literature, in business, wherever she desired to be, she has calmly and with dignity