An acquaintance with the views and the knowledge of epochs already submerged in the shoreless ocean of time, frees the mind from the fetters and currents of the day, with its often oppressive restraint, widens the horizon for a glance into the past, and an insight into the present of human activity, deepens the view for a comprehension of the ideas which guided the earlier and the more recent physicians, and gives, on the other hand, to our daily professional labor a higher consecration, by inserting it as a most. useful and necessary link in the chain of development of past and future humanity. The significance of the work of the individual, and his true value and true position with regard to all humanity, are first revealed to us clearly in and through history.

When, however, we have reviewed the labors of thousands of years, and have seen how in their course our science has been advanced, albeit in unexpectedly tedious ways; when too we have found how little service, on the whole, has been rendered to the main object of medicine—the cure of disease-and above all in internal medicine, which enjoys the most extensive field of activity, we are at first sadly disappointed. For in spite of all therapeutics, the word of the Psalmist preserves its internal truth: "As for man his days are as grass: as a flower of the field so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone." But on a closer study of the subject, this knowledge awakens another feeling.

For as no other department of the medical sciences is so well adapted to educate the physician in conscious modesty, so on the other hand, none is so fitted to fill his consciousness with just pride in his often contested and self-sacrificing labors. As the history of medicine shows him the inadequacy of medical knowledge and, in the majority of cases, the absolute nullity of medical skill in the struggle with the laws of an all-powerful nature, so it places before his eyes the unwearied struggles of the physicians of all ages-struggles to investigate those laws, and to appropriate to the healing and blessing of suffering humanity the knowledge already acquired, or to be acquired, thereby. Hence we prize infinitely less the fact that history, among almost all people, presents to our eyes the immortal gods as the authors of medical art, than that it teaches us how mortal men have struggled continually after god-like aims-the prevention, the cure, or at east the alleviation lof the woe and suffering imposed as an unavoidable heritage, and in a thousand different forms, upon us created beings—even though to-day, as in the past, these aims have been only imperfectly attained. The history of medicine also teaches us to honor, indeed to admire. humanity, particularly physicians and their past and present struggles, while our daily practice and the daily actions of individuals might perhaps readily lead us to an opposite feeling. It shows us how many a noble man has served medical science, and art, and humanity, devoting his self-denying strength and life to the sick, the feeble, the persecuted, the poor, and the insane, and performing deeds which have not, indeed, dazzled and carried away the multitude by their brilliant results, but

whose portals wander priests in ample mantles, to guard them from the entrance of the uncalled. On either side appear mighty crags and groups of lofty trees, whose foliage is penetrated by the powerful rays of the noonday sun, while the foreground greets us in undimmed brilliancy and instinct with life. To the distant sky with its cloudy forms we may compare the mythical era of medicine, with its storied gods and demigods of punishment and of healing. To the background, the cognate priestly era, with its sacerdotal physicians and theurgic medicine, and its works hallowed by faith. The middle ground may be likened to the union of terrestial and celestial philosophy with medicine, the philosophic period; and finally the clear foreground, to the scientific epoch, with its practical principles and ideas. These various periods of development with different nations extend over distinct and long eras. Some of these periods with certain people have never been abandoned; others have not been traversed, and still others never attained. All, however, encroach on each other more or less, and the last two particularly are practically distinguished from each other only by adopting as the basis of such a distinction the tendency to abstract philosophical reasoning or to reasoning based upon the observation of the senses. The predominance of the one or the other of these intellectual tendencies then affixes its stamp to the whole period, though a complete separation of the two has never existed.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL SCIENCE

is best traced in some one people, and most easily among the Greeks, inasmuch as a number of their works, following each other in regular succession from the earliest to the later periods of development, have been preserved to us. Thus in the earliest writings we can perceive that the first medical services were of a surgical character, and that these had already attained a certain degree of perfection at a period when scarcely any traces of internal medicine were to be found. That the latter-undoubtedly anticipated by ophthalmology-was also preceded by a knowledge of midwifery, which, indeed, until a late day was generally regarded as belonging to surgery, seems apparent from the early appearance of midwives-and obstetrical goddesses, a species of divinity now, alas, extinct and frequently substituted by individuals of the masculine gender. What we now call internal medicine first developed, at all events, after the mythical or heroic period, and probably not until the end of the philosophic period of Greek medicine. Medical services too in those days were not divided into separate departments, but the various branches were first separated from the original and long pre-existing trunk of general medicine some centuries before the commencement of our era-in the Alexandrian period— to be once more subdivided during the age of the Roman Empire, an age in which the Greeks were almost the sole representatives of medical science. In the course of later ages (particularly in the beginning of the 16th century) this subdivision, in proportion to the increasing material of the

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science and the greater number of physicians, became still more marked. Indeed at the present day the numerous special departments represent a kind of German Bund', within which the unity of medical science and the appreciation of that unity appear and live almost entirely in those medical circles composed of what we call practising physicians, while the great potentates in this medical confederation must, for the most part, be contented to cultivate and to understand their special states, be they larger or smaller, but are often not required to investigate in any way the departments of others.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION,

as the practical evidence of the tendency of medical science, naturally took about the same course as the latter itself. For a long period there were general physicians only; then they divided themselves into some few departments; but as the medical profession became overcrowded and began to decline there have always appeared specialists, frequently an infinite. number of them.

PROGRESS OF MEDICAL CULTURE IN THE VARIOUS GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS OF THE EARTH.

This followed such a course that, as early as the beginning of the second millennium B. C., northern Africa and eastern Asia possessed an independent medical literature (corresponding to the development of the period), and the countries between the limits mentioned, e. g. Palestine, Phoenicia, Babylonia, Syria, Persia, as well as China and Japan, were also at a very early date in the enjoyment of a medical literature, though all did not, like the countries first mentioned, possess a purely professional literature. After these, Europe, the youngest member of the old world, was the first to enter upon a medical culture of its own. It, however, in contrast to the others, continued a permanent and wider development. Within the countries of Europe, however, medicine followed the general direction of all culture, tending from the south-east toward the west. In the socalled New World were found only traces of a mythical, theurgic, utterly gross and empirical medicine, whose nutrient vessels, tied, alas, by the whites, were prevented from supporting a further development. The civilzed America and Australia of the present day were (and are still) in great part educated, in both medicine and all other departments of science, by Europe and her sons, though they are now beginning in many respects a development of their own.

While in the earliest ages the Arian stock had attained a tolerably high, and the Mongolian a less elevated, grade of medical knowledge, subsequently the latter race, disappeared utterly from the ranks of progressive medical science-the Japanese, however, seem desirous recently of resuming their lost position-and at the present day the Arians alone, in their various branches, are the sole representatives of such scientific progress.