or years, but it was long before this grand result was attained.

Experimental methods of study gradually came into vogue, particularly in
the domain of physiology. In this sphere Dr. William Beaumont, of the
United States Army, was a pioneer. His historic experiments on Alexis
St. Martin, a soldier who had been wounded in the stomach and recovered
with a permanent opening into that organ, will ever rank among the most
important of the early experimental studies of digestion. It was not
long before Claude Bernard extended similar inquiries to the other
functions of the body, notably those of the nervous system; and since
his time there has been a long array of brilliant investigators of
physiology and of other branches of science tributary to medicine.
Experiments on living animals were almost the only means of carrying on
these researches. In the early days the animals employed were doubtless
put to a great deal of pain--perhaps in many instances to unnecessary
suffering--and an altogether laudable feeling of humanity has led good
people to band themselves together for the purpose of putting a stop to
vivisection, or at least of greatly restricting the practice and of
freeing it from all avoidable infliction of pain. These praiseworthy
efforts have in some instances been carried so far, unfortunately, as to
seriously hamper scientific investigation--investigation which has for
its object the alleviation of human suffering and the saving of human
life. We may earnestly deprecate and strive to prevent wanton
reiteration of painful experiments for purposes of demonstrating anew
that which is unquestioned, and we may resort to all possible means to
render necessary experiments free from actual pain (from the anguish of
trepidation we can seldom relieve the poor animals), but let us not
block the wheels of scientific progress.

At the dawn of the Nineteenth Century, to examine a sick person's
pulse, to inspect his tongue, to observe his breathing, to interrogate
his skin by our sense of touch, and to try to make his statements and
those of his friends fit in with some tenable theory of the nature of
his ailment, were about all we could do. Possibly it was because he
realized to an uncommon degree the tremendous impediment of this narrow
limitation that Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of Homoeopathy, cut the
Gordian knot in sheer rebelliousness, and proclaimed, as he virtually
did, that a diagnosis was not necessary to the suc