Spirochete Pallida and Its Demonstration in Sections, by PAGE "THE MODERN DOCTOR."* BY A. JACOBI, M.D., LL.D., OF NEW YORK. Mr. President, Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Faculty and of the Graduating Class, Ladies and Gentlemen: Our first medical traditions date back to the East Indies and Egypt; our first real knowledge is derived from Hellas, the mother of the world's culture. Even Hellas had no regular physicians until the period of Lykurgos. It is true that Homer eulogizes the healing man, but medicine was mostly theocratic. Gods, demi-gods and their priests would heal the sick. It was Apollo who smote men and armies with infectious diseases, and again relieved and saved them. But as there were always those who were sick and injured, attempts to aid them were the results of sympathy and alleged or real experience. Herodotus tells us that in Babylon the sick person was carried to the market place and took his choice between the advices of the multitude. In Greece the temples of the Gods in which the priests practiced celestial fraud and terrestrial experience, the tablets on which individual ailments and remedies were collected, accumulated a store of available advice. But the translucent sky of Hellas did not permit of predominance of obscurantism; her shrewd politicians and profound philosophers would not be satisfied with the mental slavery engendered by credulity; in the absence of manifold knowledge of natural things they began to philosophize. Empedokles taught a theory of affinities he called them love and hatred that regulated the globe which was composed of four elements, viz.: air, earth, water and fire. In the animal * An address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the Washington University Medical Department, St. Louis, Mo., May 25th, 1905. body these were represented in blood, mucus, and yellow and black bile, and laid the groundwork for a humoral theory, while Demokritos and Epicure established the first atomistic theory and a solidar pathology. In the last century before Christ it was elaborated by that learned and popular Greek physician of Rome, Asklepiades. Hippocrates was brought up in the theories of Empedokles, but never was there a more observing, empiric, reasoning and practical mind than his, never a warmer heart, a more ethical conscience, nor an intellect freer from hypothetical or unfounded assumption. Neither Aristotle nor Plato appreciated Hippocrates at his full value. Though the former had all and more than the learning of his period, he was too much of a theorist like Plato himself to understand or to follow the great physician in his empiricism and the observation of facts. But it was Aristotle, and after him Herophilus, and two centuries later Galen, who added immensely to the knowledge of anatomy. Thereby they created a foundation for surgery, which nobody, however, during the reign of the school of Alexandria, had the unscientific tendency, rather prevalent with us, to separate from medicine. Galen could have continued to become the idolized creator of medicine to our own times, if he had been able to keep apart from the speculations of Greek philosophy and clung to the Hippocratic method of observing without theorizing. Still, his means for obtaining knowledge were limited. His anatomy is that of animals; the teachings of the Koran, centuries afterwards, were opposed to the study of human anatomy, and both Galen and the medicine of the Arabs, while adding profusely to what we should call clinical and pharmaceutical knowledge, fell short of being the elaborators of Hippocratic medicine. Still Galen and Aristotle controlled the thinking of the world until the era of Bacon, for fifteen hundred years. Such an unbounded influence is never anywhere except in religion or in science. exerted by a single man In politics the gradual evolution of a nation, or of mankind, is not governed by an individual. No Alexander, or Caesar, or Charlemagne, or Napoleon, or much smaller men with only a single thought in their heads like Bismarck, could have shaped the world anew, if the social and political situation had not favored them. History made them, but in science single men may make history. So did Paracelsus when he discarded the yoke of Galen who had reigned undisturbed 1600 years. So did towards the end of the 18th century Morgagni when he introduced anatomical thinking into medicine; Haller, when he taught the functions of different organs, mainly the muscles, and discovered the existence of sensitive nerves, and of different directions of nerve currents; so did John Hunter when he established pathological anatomy and experimentation for that is what he founded when he preached the paradoxical text: "Do not think, try "Jenner when he laid the foundation of sero- and organotherapy; Bichat when he created histology. That is what Virchow did — guided by his predecessors and by Schwann and Schleiden when he fixed the throne of life in the invisible cell; or Pasteur when forever he demonstrated the omnipresence and omnipotence of the unseen microbe. "The universe itself is narrow," says the poet, "when compared with the vastness of man's brain." Still the few centuries following the time of Bacon and of Paracelsus were barren in their effect on clinical medicine. Sydenham, Boerhaave, von Swieten and Peter Frank were great and influential, but the foundation of medicine was not sound, and wanton systems followed one another both in philosophy and medicine. The clouded mental atmosphere produced two peculiar systems, the modifications of which claim our attention this very day. They were Mesmerism and Hahnemannism. Mesmer was not always a fraud. Contrary to most frauds he was learned, but his mind was always tinged with mysticism. His very inaugural thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body (1766) betrays him. He sank so far as to treat diseases by animal magnetism at a distance. Our present fakirs are only shallow imi tations. Hahnemann began his career with a paper published in 1796. Within a few years he completed his teachings, the principal of which were as follows: The only vocation of the physician is to heal; theoretical knowledge is of no use. In a case of sickness he should only know what is curable, and the remedies. Of the diseases he cannot know anything except the symptoms. There are internal changes, but it is impossible to learn what they are; symptoms alone are accessible; with their removal by remedies the disease is removed. Their effects can be studied in the healthy only. They act on the sick by causing a disease similar to that which is to be combated, and which dissolves itself into this similar affection. The full doses required to cause symptoms in the well are too large to be employed as remedies for the sick. The healing power of the drug grows in an inverse proportion to its substance. He says literally: "Only potencies are homeopathic medicines." "I recognize nobody as my follower but him who gives medicine in so small doses as to preclude the perception of anything medicinal in them by means either of the senses or of chemistry." "The pellets may be held near the young infant when asleep." "Gliding the hand over the patient will cure him, provided the manipulation be done with firm intention to render as much good with it as possible, for its power is in the benevolent will of the manipulator." Such is the homeopathy of Hahnemann, which is no longer recognized in what they call homeopathy to-day. A modern critic (Tagal) says of Hahnemann's teaching that his new system which was announced with ferocity, and appeared unintelligible and crude to a sound mind, could not but impress the multitude which did not differentiate between one bad logic and the other. His contempt for actual observations and |