The romance of medicine / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Ronald Campbell Macfie
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The romance of medicine / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    know that microbes are as real as mosquitoes, and that if measles is imaginary, so is man. We know many things, but we know them only be¬ cause we have been taught and told. The great discoveries are not our discoveries ; we could not have made them, and in many cases we do not understand them. The world has been made and interpreted for us by great minds, but we ourselves are really as helpless as the savages. Were we put on the earth under the stars, and left to form our own cosmic and physiological theories, they would be, indeed, very weird and fantastic. Experiments have been made in bringing up children in total ignorance of religion and ethics. It would be a more interesting experiment still to bring up a child in total ignorance of all science, and then, at the age of reason, introduce him to the phenomena of nature. Where would he be ? What would the stars, and the sky, and the wind mean to him ? Would he personify the elements ? Would he see in the sunrise Hercules on the fiery pile, and in the sunset Orpheus and Eurydice ? Would the blue sky be the floor of heaven ? Would there be an under-world tenanted by demons ? And would unknown lands have their centaurs, and hydras, and gorgons, and unicorns ? Or would his mind begin further forward with Thales and Anaximander ? Would he, substituting air for Zeus, and water for Posei¬ don, construct some wonderful cosmogony ? Cer-
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