Science and the Progress of Medicine

be cannot goveem her."-BAGLIVI. MAN has, since prehistoric times, sought to explain the natural phenomena of the world in which he lived in terms which he found most easy to understand. What we call the scientific discipline was evolved as a purposeful and basic method which made it possible to give unity and intelligibility to the facts of nature. rhis method utilises observation, measurement, reflection, and experiment. When first applied in the natural sciences, knowledge quickly followed, for the problems in these fields could be readily confined and the environmental factors controlled. The situation in the biological sciences was less simple, but in none of the branches of this science was it as difficult as in medicine. Here human beings were involved who were incapable of complete isolation from both their external and internal environments and because of the claims of ethics precluded from experiment. If we trace the application of the scientific discipline to medicine, we will see, nevertheless, how it has been responsible for much of the progress which has been made. We will also see how this has led medical men to seek to explain first the structure, then the function, and lastly the dynamics of the human body. At the same time, as the tools and technology of science improved, it became possible to studv progressively smaller sub-units. First the body, then the organs, then the cells composing the organs, and lastly the intracellular components. I wish to present the growth of medicine under the influence of science, to deal with ideas and principles rather than details of practice, and to take examples to illustrate the more recent advances from that branch of medicine with which I am most familiar-namely disorders of the blood. A thousand vears before the birth of Christ western medicine began in Greece. At that time the supremacy of Grecian culture was built on its serenity, its scholarship, and its spirit of freedom. Its medicine was originally a mystical cult derived from the rites of initiated sects and practised in the temples of ]Esculapius. The phvsicians were priests who interpreted the dreams of patients admitted to the temples and supplemented these by clinical observations. Prayer and sacrifice were part of the ritual and the sacred snake was the emblem of healing. 73 G