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 successful treatment of disease, but that one only needed to know empirically how to subdue symptoms, meaning mainly, if not solely, what we term “subjective” symptoms—­those of which the patient complains, as opposed to those that we ourselves discover.  But the physical examination of the sick, before extremely meagre in its sphere and restricted in its possibilities, was destined to expand before many years into the minute and positive physical diagnosis of the present day.