Like everything else that is good and durable in the world, modern medicine is a product of the Greek intellect, and had its origin when that wonderful people created positive or rational science, and no small credit is due to the physicians who, as Professor Gomperz remarks (in his brilliant chapter "On the Age of Enlightenment," Greek Thinkers, Vol. I), very early brought to bear the spirit of criticism on the arbitrary and superstitious views of the phenomena of life. If science was ever to acquire "steady and accurate habits instead of losing itself in a maze of fantasies, it must be by quiet and methodical research." "It is the undying glory of the school of Cos that it introduced this innovation into the domain of its Art, and thus exercised the most beneficial influences on the whole intellectual life of mankind. Fiction to the right! Reality to the left! was the battle cry of this school in the war it was first to wage against the excesses and defects of the nature philosophy" (Gomperz)
The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations of modern medicine on broad lines, and we owe to it: first, the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of priestcraft and of caste; secondly, the conception of medicine as an art based on accurate observation, and as a science, an integral part of the science of man and of nature; thirdly, the high moral ideals, expressed in that "memorable of human documents" (Gomperz), the Hippocratic Oath; and fourthly, the conception and realization of medicine as the profession of a cultivated gentleman.
No other profession can boast of the same unbroken continuity of methods and ideals. We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succession. Schools and systems have flourished and gone, schools which have swayed for generations the thought of our guilds and systems that have died before their founders; the philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow; through long ages which were slowly learning what we are hurrying to forget - amid all the changes and chances of twenty-five centuries, the profession has never lacked men who have lived up to these Greek ideals. They were those of Galen and Aretaeus, of the men of the Alexandrian and Byzantine schools, of the best of the Arabians, of the men of the Renaissance, and they are ours today.
A second distinctive feature is the remarkable solidarity. Of no other profession is the word universal applicable in the same sense. The celebrated phrase used of the Catholic Church is in truth much more appropriate when applied to medicine. It is not the prevalence of disease or the existence everywhere of special groups of men to treat it that betokens this solidarity, but it is the identity throughout the civilized world of our ambitions, our methods and our work. To wrest from nature the secrets which have perplexed philosophers in all ages, to track to their sources the causes of disease, to correlate the vast stores of knowledge, that they may be quickly available for the prevention and cure of disease - these are our ambitions. To carefully observe the phenomena of life in all its phases, normal and perverted, to make perfect that most difficult of all arts, the art of observation, to call to aid the science of experimentation, to cultivate the reasoning faculty, so as to be able to know the true from the false - these are our methods. To prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick - this is our work. The profession in truth is a sort of guild or brotherhood, any member of which can take up his calling in any part of the world and find brethren whose language and methods and whose aims and ways are identical with his own.
Thirdly, its progressive character. Based on science, medicine has followed and partaken of its fortunes, so that in the great awakening which has made the nineteenth memorable among centuries, the profession received a quickening impulse more powerful than at any period in its history. With the sole exception of the mechanical sciences, no other department of human knowledge has undergone so profound a change - a change so profound that we who have grown up in it have but slight appreciation of its momentous character. And not only in what has been actually accomplished in unravelling the causes of disease, in perfecting methods of prevention, and in wholesale relief of suffering, but also in the unloading of old formulae and in the substitution of the scientific spirit of free inquiry for cast-iron dogmas we see a promise of still greater achievement and of a more glorious future.
And lastly, the profession of medicine is distinguished from all others by its singular beneficence. It alone does the work of charity in a jovian and God-like way, dispensing with a free hand truly Promethean gifts. There are those who listen to me who have seen three of the most benign endowments granted to the race since the great Titan stole fire from the heavens. Search the scriptures of human achievement and you cannot find any to equal in beneficence the introduction of Anaesthesia, Sanitation, with all that it includes, and Asepsis - a short half-century contribution towards the practical solution of the problems of human suffering, regarded as eternal and insoluble. We form almost a monopoly or trust in this business. Nobody else comes into active competition with us, certainly not the other learned professions which continue along the old lines. Every few years sees some new conquest, so that we have ceased to wonder. The work of half a dozen men, headed by Laveran, has made waste places of the earth habitable and the wilderness to blossom as the rose. There seems to be no limit to the possibilities of scientific medicine, and while philanthropists are turning to it as the hope of humanity, philosophers see, as in some far-off vision, a science from which may come in the prophetic words of the Son of Sirach, "Peace over all the earth."
Never has the outlook for the profession been brighter. Everywhere the physician is better trained and better equipped than he was twenty-five years ago. Disease is understood more thoroughly, studied more carefully and treated more skillfully. The average sum of human suffering has been reduced in a way to make the angels rejoice. Diseases familiar to our fathers and grandfathers have disappeared, the death rate from others is falling to the vanishing point, and public health measures have lessened the sorrows and brightened the lives of millions. The vagaries and whims, lay and medical, may have neither diminished in number nor lessened in their capacity to distress the faint-hearted who do not appreciate that to the end of time people must imagine vain things, but they are dwarfed by comparison with the colossal advance of the past fifty years.
Medicine is the only world-wide profession, following everywhere the same methods, actuated by the same ambitions, and pursuing the same ends. This homogeneity, its most characteristic feature, is not shared by the law, and not by the Church, certainly not in the same degree. While in antiquity the law rivals medicine, there is not in it that extraordinary solidarity which makes the physician at home in any country, in any place where two or three sons of merit are gathered together. Similar in its high aims and in the devotion of its officers, the Christian Church, widespread as it is, and saturated with the humanitarian instincts of its Founder, yet lacks that catholicity - urbi et orbi - which enables the physician to practise the same art amid the same surroundings in every country of the earth. There is a unity, too, in its aim - the prevention of diseases by discovering their causes, and the cure and relief of sickness and suffering. In a little more than a century, a united profession working in many lands has done more for the race than has ever been accomplished by any other body of men. So great have these gifts that we have almost lost our appreciation of them. Vaccination, sanitation, anaesthesia, antiseptic surgery, the science of bacteriology, and the art of therapeutics have effected a revolution in our civilization to which can be compared only the extraordinary progress in the mechanical sciences. Over the latter, there is this supreme advantage, it is domestic - a bedroom revolution which sooner or later touches each one of us, if not in person, in those near and dear - a revolution which for the first time in history of poor, suffering humanity brings us appreciably closer to that promised day when the former things should pass away, when there should be no more unnecessary death, when sorrow and crying should be no more, and there should not be any more pain.