A system of personal biologic examinations the condition of adequate medical and scientific conduct of life / George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
[1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A system of personal biologic examinations the condition of adequate medical and scientific conduct of life / George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    4/14 (page 4)
    ditions of success and failure. All the biologic and medical special sciences have struggled toward an un- reached unity; all are single rays, as it were, awaiting the lens of a focalizing intelligence to illumine the con- crete image of oiir total physical appearance here. War has devised a rough and crude system of physical exam- inations for the would-be soldier; insurance companies have more accurately examined the bodies and life- prospects of their policy-holders to estimate their finan- cial risks; through the Bertillon system, criminology has still more perfectly fixed the anatomic measuring of the bodies of the lawbreaker; the Amherst and Harvard examinations have looked into the muscular functions of a few students for four years of their lives; the psychophysic laboratory has measured a few neurologic reactions; the medical practitioner has found out a few ways of reaching backward to the etiology of some single diseases; a few hundred school children have been sub- jected to some tests as to growth and the influence upon organization of poverty and wealth. But all these, I believe, are sporadic and ineffectual hints of a coming science of man, based upon a thoroughgoing and repeti- tive system of physiologic and pathologic examinations which will iiltimately give us a genuine and all-compris- ing science of anthropology based upon all the data, morphologic, physiologic, andv pathogenic, of the entire individual life. Prophecy and prognosis are based upon a thorough knowledge of the past and present fact, a rigid understanding in a scientific sense of the evolution of the organism and of its present departures from a normal standard. For his children a foresighted man must wish such an accounting, such a prophecy and prognosis; and as to himself every intelligent adult, when he awakens to scientific consciousness, must try to look forward through the years, and reckon up his powers and possibilities of life. This most important function of prevision has heretofore been left to the gypsies, the palmists, the astrologists, and the clairvoy- ants ! Is it a wise way for science to leave the individ- ual struggler, unconscious and ignorant of his own body and its fateful laws, incapable of learning the scattered and ununified half-sciences blindly converging