Chapter 21
I cannot help believing that medical curative treatment will by and by resolve itself in great measure into modifications of the food, swallowed and breathed, and of the natural stimuli, and that less will be expected from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, either alien or assimilable. The noted mineral-waters containing iron, sulphur, carbonic acid, supply nutritious or stimulating materials to the body as much as phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to the cereal plants. The effects of a milk and vegetable diet, of gluten bread in diabetes, of cod-liver oil in phthisis, even of such audacious innovations as the water-cure and the grape-cure, are only hints of what will be accomplished when we have learned to discover what organic elements are deficient or in excess in a case of chronic disease, and the best way of correcting the abnormal condition, just as an agriculturist ascertains the wants of his crops and modifies the composition of his soil. In acute febrile diseases we have long ago discovered that far above all drug-medication is the use of mild liquid diet in the period of excitement, and of stimulant and nutritious food in that of exhaustion. Hippocrates himself was as particular about his barley-ptisan as any Florence Nightingale of our time could be.
The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession, belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the direction of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies. What is it that makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English physicians? His prescriptions consisted principally of simples. An aperient or an opiate, a “cardiac” or a tonic, may be commonly found in the midst of a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs. It was not by his pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great name. It was by daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients, and riding on horseback for consumptives, in place of the smothering system, and the noxious and often loathsome rubbish of the established schools. Of course Sydenham was much abused by his contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to remind his reader. “I must needs conclude,” he says, “either that I am void of merit, or that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are formed with so excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to gratitude, make a very small part of the whole.” If in the fearless pursuit of truth you should find the world as ungracious in the nineteenth century as he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a lesson of self-reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious physician: “'T is none of my business to inquire what other persons think, but to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no favor of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper.”
The physician has learned a great deal from the surgeon, who is naturally in advance of him, because he has a better opportunity of seeing the effects of his remedies. Let me shorten one of Ambroise Pare's stories for you. There had been a great victory at the pass of Susa, and they were riding into the city. The wounded cried out as the horses trampled them under their hoofs, which caused good Ambroise great pity, and made him wish himself back in Paris. Going into a stable he saw four dead soldiers, and three desperately wounded, placed with their backs against the wall. An old campaigner came up.--“Can these fellows get well?” he said. “No!” answered the surgeon. Thereupon, the old soldier walked up to them and cut all their throats, sweetly, and without wrath (doulcement et sans cholere). Ambroise told him he was a bad man to do such a thing. “I hope to God;” he said, “somebody will do as much for me if I ever get into such a scrape” (accoustre de telle facon). “I was not much salted in those days” (bien doux de sel), says Ambroise, “and little acquainted with the treatment of wounds.” However, as he tells us, he proceeded to apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after the approved fashion of the time,--with what torture to the patient may be guessed. At last his precious oil gave out, and he used instead an insignificant mixture of his own contrivance. He could not sleep that night for fear his patients who had not been scalded with the boiling oil would be poisoned by the gunpowder conveyed into their wounds by the balls. To his surprise, he found them much better than the others the next morning, and resolved never again to burn his patients with hot oil for gun-shot wounds.
This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform which has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the farrago of external applications which had been a source of profit to apothecaries and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny complained of them. A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church, laboring among the wounded of Bull Run, tells me they had nothing but water for dressing, and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to see how well the wounds did under that simple treatment.
Let me here mention a fact or two which may be of use to some of you who mean to enter the public service. You will, as it seems, have gun-shot wounds almost exclusively to deal with. Three different surgeons, the one just mentioned and two who saw the wounded of Big Bethel, assured me that they found no sabre-cuts or bayonet wounds. It is the rifle-bullet from a safe distance which pierces the breasts of our soldiers, and not the gallant charge of broad platoons and sweeping squadrons, such as we have been in the habit of considering the chosen mode of warfare of ancient and modern chivalry. [Sir Charles James Napier had the same experience in Virginia in 1813. “Potomac. We have nasty sort of fighting here, amongst creeks and bushes, and lose men without show.” “Yankee never shows himself, he keeps in the thickest wood, fires and runs off.”--“These five thousand in the open field might be attacked, but behind works it would be throwing away lives.” He calls it “an inglorious warfare,”--says one of the leaders is “a little deficient in gumption,--but--still my opinion is, that if we tuck up our sleeves and lay our ears back we might thrash them; that is, if we caught them out of their trees, so as to slap at them with the bayonet.”--Life, etc. vol. i. p. 218 et seq.]
Another fact parallels the story of the old campaigner, and may teach some of you caution in selecting your assistants. A chaplain told it to two of our officers personally known to myself. He overheard the examination of a man who wished to drive one of the “avalanche” wagons, as they call them. The man was asked if he knew how to deal with wounded men. “Oh yes,” he answered; “if they're hit here,” pointing to the abdomen, “knock 'em on the head,--they can't get well.”
In art and outside of it you will meet the same barbarisms that Ambroise Pare met with,--for men differ less from century to century than we are apt to suppose; you will encounter the same opposition, if you attack any prevailing opinion, that Sydenham complained of. So far as possible, let not such experiences breed in you a contempt for those who are the subjects of folly or prejudice, or foster any love of dispute for its own sake. Should you become authors, express your opinions freely; defend them rarely. It is not often that an opinion is worth expressing, which cannot take care of itself. Opposition is the best mordant to fix the color of your thought in the general belief.
It is time to bring these crowded remarks to a close. The day has been when at the beginning of a course of Lectures I should have thought it fitting to exhort you to diligence and entire devotion to your tasks as students. It is not so now. The young man who has not heard the clarion-voices of honor and of duty now sounding throughout the land, will heed no word of mine. In the camp or the city, in the field or the hospital, under sheltering roof, or half-protecting canvas, or open sky, shedding our own blood or stanching that of our wounded defenders, students or teachers, whatever our calling and our ability, we belong, not to ourselves, but to our imperilled country, whose danger is our calamity, whose ruin would be our enslavement, whose rescue shall be our earthly salvation!
SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING.
An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard University, November 6, 1867.
The idea is entertained by some of our most sincere professional brethren, that to lengthen and multiply our Winter Lectures will be of necessity to advance the cause of medical education. It is a fair subject for consideration whether they do not overrate the relative importance of that particular mode of instruction which forms the larger part of these courses.
As this School could only lengthen its lecture term at the expense of its “Summer Session,” in which more direct, personal, and familiar teaching takes the place of our academic discourses, and in which more time can be given to hospitals, infirmaries, and practical instruction in various important specialties, whatever might be gained, a good deal would certainly be lost in our case by the exchange.
The most essential part of a student's instruction is obtained, as I believe, not in the lecture-room, but at the bedside. Nothing seen there is lost; the rhythms of disease are learned by frequent repetition; its unforeseen occurrences stamp themselves indelibly in the memory. Before the student is aware of what he has acquired, he has learned the aspects and course and probable issue of the diseases he has seen with his teacher, and the proper mode of dealing with them, so far as his master knows it. On the other hand, our ex cathedra prelections have a strong tendency to run into details which, however interesting they may be to ourselves and a few of our more curious listeners, have nothing in them which will ever be of use to the student as a practitioner. It is a perfectly fair question whether I and some other American Professors do not teach quite enough that is useless already. Is it not well to remind the student from time to time that a physician's business is to avert disease, to heal the sick, to prolong life, and to diminish suffering? Is it not true that the young man of average ability will find it as much as he can do to fit himself for these simple duties? Is it not best to begin, at any rate, by making sure of such knowledge as he will require in his daily walk, by no means discouraging him from any study for which his genius fits him when he once feels that he has become master of his chosen art.
I know that many branches of science are of the greatest value as feeders of our medical reservoirs. But the practising physician's office is to draw the healing waters, and while he gives his time to this labor he can hardly be expected to explore all the sources that spread themselves over the wide domain of science. The traveller who would not drink of the Nile until he had tracked it to its parent lakes, would be like to die of thirst; and the medical practitioner who would not use the results of many laborers in other departments without sharing their special toils, would find life far too short and art immeasurably too long.
We owe much to Chemistry, one of the most captivating as well as important of studies; but the medical man must as a general rule content himself with a clear view of its principles and a limited acquaintance with its facts; such especially as are pertinent to his pursuits. I am in little danger of underrating Anatomy or Physiology; but as each of these branches splits up into specialties, any one of which may take up a scientific life-time, I would have them taught with a certain judgment and reserve, so that they shall not crowd the more immediately practical branches. So of all the other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of knowledge, I would have them strictly subordinated to that particular kind of knowledge for which the community looks to its medical advisers.
A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as medicine itself is a science. On the natural history side, medicine is a science; on the curative side, chiefly an art. This is implied in Hufeland's aphorism: “The physician must generalize the disease and individualize the patient.”
The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we know about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of sickness. We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away its fruit; we eat the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw away its root. Nothing but vulgar experience has taught us to reject the potato ball and cook the tomato. So of most of our remedies. The subchloride of mercury, calomel, is the great British specific; the protochloride of mercury, corrosive sublimate, kills like arsenic, but no chemist could have told us it would be so.
From observations like these we can obtain certain principles from which we can argue deductively to facts of a like nature, but the process is limited, and we are suspicious of all reasoning in that direction applied to the processes of healthy and diseased life. We are continually appealing to special facts. We are willing to give Liebig's artificial milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the child anxiously whose wet-nurse is a chemist's pipkin. A pair of substantial mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned Professor's brain, in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for infants.
The bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching. Certain branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner. But the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit. The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from practical skill, he may be a useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the health of the community is intrusted.
To those who are not to engage in practice, the various pursuits of science hardly require to be commended. Only they must not be disappointed if they find many subjects treated in our courses as a medical class requires, rather than as a scientific class would expect, that is, with special limitations and constant reference to practical ends. Fortunately they are within easy reach of the highest scientific instruction. The business of a school like this is to make useful working physicians, and to succeed in this it is almost as important not to overcrowd the mind of the pupil with merely curious knowledge as it is to store it with useful information.
In this direction I have written my lecture, not to undervalue any form of scientific labor in its place, an unworthy thought from which I hope I need not defend myself,--but to discourage any undue inflation of the scholastic programme, which even now asks more of the student than the teacher is able to obtain from the great majority of those who present themselves for examination. I wish to take a hint in education from the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, who regards the cultivation of too much land as a great defect in our New England farming. I hope that our Medical Institutions may never lay themselves open to the kind of accusation Mr. Lowe brings against the English Universities, when he says that their education is made up “of words that few understand and most will shortly forget; of arts that can never be used, if indeed they can even be learnt; of histories inapplicable to our times; of languages dead and even mouldy; of grammatical rules that never had living use and are only post mortem examinations; and of statements fagoted with utter disregard of their comparative value.”
This general thought will be kept in view throughout my somewhat discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun my hour, you must pardon me, for I can say with Pascal that I have not had the time to make my lecture shorter.
In the year 1647, that good man John Eliot, commonly called the Apostle Eliot, writing to Mr. Thomas Shepherd, the pious minister of Cambridge, referring to the great need of medical instruction for the Indians, used these words:
“I have thought in my heart that it were a singular good work, if the Lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in England to give some maintenance toward some Schoole or Collegiate exercise this way, wherein there should be Anatomies and other instructions that way, and where there might be some recompence given to any that should bring in any vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of Physick.
“There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way, namely that our young students in Physick may be trained up better then they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are forced to fall to practise before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or duely trained up in making experiments, for we never had but one Anatomy in the countrey, which Mr. Giles Firman [Firmin] now in England, did make and read upon very well, but no more of that now.”
Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the hearts of our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges where medicine is taught in all its branches. Mr. Giles Firmin's “Anatomy” may be considered the first ancestor of a long line of skeletons which have been dangling and rattling in our lecture-rooms for more than a century.
Teaching in New England in 1647 was a grave but simple matter. A single person, combining in many cases, as in that of Mr. Giles Firmin, the offices of physician and preacher, taught what he knew to a few disciples whom he gathered about him. Of the making of that “Anatomy” on which my first predecessor in the branch I teach “did read very well” we can know nothing. The body of some poor wretch who had swung upon the gallows, was probably conveyed by night to some lonely dwelling at the outskirts of the village, and there by the light of flaring torches hastily dissected by hands that trembled over the unwonted task. And ever and anon the master turned to his book, as he laid bare the mysteries of the hidden organs; to his precious Vesalius, it might be, or his figures repeated in the multifarious volume of Ambroise Pare; to the Aldine octavo in which Fallopius recorded his fresh observations; or that giant folio of Spigelius just issued from the press of Amsterdam, in which lovely ladies display their viscera with a coquettish grace implying that it is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show the lace-like omentum, and hold up their appendices epiploicae as if they were saying “these are our jewels.”
His teaching of medicine was no doubt chiefly clinical, and received with the same kind of faith as that which accepted his words from the pulpit. His notions of disease were based on what he had observed, seen always in the light of the traditional doctrines in which he was bred. His discourse savored of the weighty doctrines of Hippocrates, diluted by the subtle speculations of Galen, reinforced by the curious comments of the Arabian schoolmen as they were conveyed in the mellifluous language of Fernelius, blended, it may be, with something of the lofty mysticism of Van Helmont, and perhaps stealing a flavor of that earlier form of Homoeopathy which had lately come to light in Sir Kenelm Digby's “Discourse concerning the Cure of Wounds by the Sympathetic Powder.”
His Pathology was mythology. A malformed foetus, as the readers of Winthrop's Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists from their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended disaster. The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus and saw figures of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with the head of an elephant. He had offered to his gaze, as born of a human mother, the effigy of a winged cherub, a pterocephalous specimen, which our Professor of Pathological Anatomy would hardly know whether to treat with the reverence due to its celestial aspect, or to imprison in one of his immortalizing jars of alcohol.
His pharmacopoeia consisted mainly of simples, such as the venerable “Herball” of Gerard describes and figures in abounding affluence. St. John's wort and Clown's All-heal, with Spurge and Fennel, Saffron and Parsley, Elder and Snake-root, with opium in some form, and roasted rhubarb and the Four Great Cold Seeds, and the two Resins, of which it used to be said that whatever the Tacamahaca has not cured, the Caranna will, with the more familiar Scammony and Jalap and Black Hellebore, made up a good part of his probable list of remedies. He would have ordered Iron now and then, and possibly an occasional dose of Antimony. He would perhaps have had a rheumatic patient wrapped in the skin of a wolf or a wild cat, and in case of a malignant fever with “purples” or petechiae, or of an obstinate king's evil, he might have prescribed a certain black powder, which had been made by calcining toads in an earthen pot; a choice remedy, taken internally, or applied to any outward grief.
Except for the toad-powder and the peremptory drastics, one might have borne up against this herb doctoring as well as against some more modern styles of medication. Barbeyrac and his scholar Sydenham had not yet cleansed the Pharmacopoeia of its perilous stuff, but there is no doubt that the more sensible physicians of that day knew well enough that a good honest herb-tea which amused the patient and his nurses was all that was required to carry him through all common disorders.
The student soon learned the physiognomy of disease by going about with his master; fevers, pleurisies, asthmas, dropsies, fluxes, small-pox, sore-throats, measles, consumptions. He saw what was done for them. He put up the medicines, gathered the herbs, and so learned something of materia medico and botany. He learned these few things easily and well, for he could give his whole attention to them. Chirurgery was a separate specialty. Women in child-birth were cared for by midwives. There was no chemistry deserving the name to require his study. He did not learn a great deal, perhaps, but what he did learn was his business, namely, how to take care of sick people.
Let me give you a picture of the old-fashioned way of instruction, by carrying you with me in imagination in the company of worthy Master Giles Firmin as he makes his round of visits among the good folk of Ipswich, followed by his one student, who shall answer to the scriptural name of Luke. It will not be for entertainment chiefly, but to illustrate the one mode of teaching which can never be superseded, and which, I venture to say, is more important than all the rest put together. The student is a green hand, as you will perceive.
In the first dwelling they come to, a stout fellow is bellowing with colic.
“He will die, Master, of a surety, methinks,” says the timid youth in a whisper.