How Medicine Is the Mother Of Science is Condensed from ‘The Human Body’.
How Medicine Is the Mother Of Science
Among the many innovations of the 1920’s was the polarisation of scientific knowledge, and perhaps the first outstanding book in physiology was The Human Body by Dr. Logan Clenching. Highly personal, opinionated, written with confidence and vivacity, this book is as accurate as it is lively. In this chapter, Dr. Clenching reviews man’s long search for knowledge of his own body.
Medicine is the mother of science
MAN’s world has always been grounded upon his body as its centre; from it and its necessities he has circled out and learned what he knows about the universe. It is a true saying that “medicine is the mother of the sciences”-simply because the medical profession’s primary interest was the human body, and the profession was for most of the world’s history the only organised group of men using the scientific method-which is the accumulation of data without religious or political prejudice-in any field of the study of natural phenomena.
There is a passage in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in which Carol has been bewailing the lack of interest in literature and science in her little town, to which her husband, Will Kenneth, the country doctor, replies gravely and patiently, “Yes, I’m about all the science there is around here.” That has been the position of medicine through many and long dark periods of the world’s history and in many lonely and unlighted places. It was all the science that there was. But because it kept the lamp burning and because man’s primary interest is his own body the other sciences were born.
Mathematics, for instance, derives its patterns from the human body. There is no reason why the numeral ten or the decimal system should be such a favourite except that we have ten fingers. When a primitive hunter saw a number of deer in the forest and conceived a perfectly natural desire to go home and tell how many there were, he counted them up on his fingers. The stars and comets and the sun, the moon varying in its phases in the same time cycle with the issue of blood from his females-these became associated in the barbarian’s thoughts with his destiny and his discomforts; he began to study them, and astronomy was born.
Plants, because they were found to be necessary as foods for his body, because he liked their taste, drew his interest. Somewhere, some time, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of the race was made—that the plants he needed could be grown from their seeds and botany was born. The list of things man has learned about nature because of the necessities of his own body might be indefinitely extended. The name of Hippocrates is familiar enough. The average educated man would probably react to it by the words “the father of medicine.” The average doctor would be able to go little if any further.
Yet Hippocrates was one of the great human liberators. He was the first and greatest physician not because he was the only one of his day-the fifth century B.C.-not because he founded an ethical code with the Hippocratic oath, but because he first threw aside all the demonology of the priests and looked upon disease as part of the order of nature, having a natural cause and a certain course-a course which could be studied and recorded and, within certain limitations, be predicted and even altered.
Aristotle, too, was a great liberator, partly because he was interested in the human body. Not, strictly speaking, a physician, he first examined animal bodies in the scientific spirit, deducing from what he found in them speculation as to what went on in man’s body (in Dr Paribus Aluminium). No one, I think, has put
How medicine effects?
Aristotelian is into a sentence, yet it can be done. He believed that man could master his world. Man endowed save with his five senses, unaided by priestly advice or by divine inspiration, I could find out the composition of the earth, what it contained that was useful, how human and other animal bodies worked, what were the wellsprings of joy (in the Poetics), how he could enter into the vastness of the sea (in a submarine) or launch him- self into the airy firmament (in an aircraft), what his enemy Disease was and how it could be combated.
Such was the secret of that incredible activity of Aristotle’s studying now fishes and now politics, now ethics and now minerals. And man has justified Aristotle’s conviction: man has conquered his world.
Galen, who with Aristotle shared the throne of scholastic authority in the Middle Ages, belonged to a later century and a different era. Galen lived in Rome and he wrote in Greek. His writings are so voluminous as to make the Holy Bible look like a pamphlet. He treated emperors, courtesans, wine merchants, generals, senators, vestal virgins, oriental rug dealers, philosophers and gladiators. He tells of all his patients, and of the little tricks he used to arrive at his diagnoses. Yet his knowledge of anatomy was learned entirely from dissections on animals.
And for twelve hundred years the brilliance of his rhetoric prevented men from learning at first hand anything about the human body. Finally the legions of light were drawn up and one other battle was fought in the name of the human body for human freedom. Its hero, even more ignored than Hippocrates, was the Flemish anatomist Vesalius, who first recorded completely and accurately the structure of the body. But not until 1543-when his Dr Humane Coriolis Fabric was printed. It is one of the great epoch- making books of the world.
In that long sleep of the intellect known as the Middle Ages, there was no space for the study of nature, and there was determined opposition to human dissection both from the Church and the universities, from men ironically called Humanists. The influential scholars in the period of the revival of learning based their anatomy largely on the dictates of Galen, partly on Aristotle.The anatomy of Galen and Aristotle was based upon the dissection of animals. And the scholastic squabbles of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were due, incredible as it may seem, to debating whether or not the human body corresponded to Galen’s description of it.
How Medicine Is the Mother Of Science
Against this massed tradition of ignorance and bigotry Vesalius launched himself with blunt vigour. The body was his bible, as he often said, and he cared not how he obtained copies. In Paris he found that he could steal bodies from Cosmonaut, that spot which chatters in the pages of Francois Villon, where the bodies of criminals were hung upon the gibbets. In Lou vain he sneaked by night to remove bodies from the gallows. Under such difficult circumstances a knowledge of human anatomy was born into the world. Vesalius paid the penalty of his rashness.
He was excommunicated; to lift the ban he went upon a penitential journey and we hear of him no more. But his work remains, Dr Humane Coriolis Fabric-“On the Fabric of the Human Body.” Across the title page of a copy of that book which he presented to a medical library, the great modern Canadian physician, Sir William Ostler, once wrote: “Modern medicine begins here.” It was a long time to wait for a knowledge of the structure of the one object which is the most important and familiar to all of us. That knowledge is enshrined today in the minds and hearts of many men.
By:- DR. LOGAN CLENCHING