Now, if there is anything on which the biological sciences have prided themselves in these latter years it is the substitution of quantitative for qualitative formulae.  The “numerical system,” of which Louis was the great advocate, if not the absolute originator, was an attempt to substitute series of carefully recorded facts, rigidly counted and closely compared, for those never-ending records of vague, unverifiable conclusions with which the classics of the healing art were overloaded.  The history of practical medicine had been like the story of the Danaides.  “Experience” had been, from time immemorial, pouring its flowing treasures into buckets full of holes.  At the existing rate of supply and leakage they would never be filled; nothing would ever be settled in medicine.  But cases thoroughly recorded and mathematically analyzed would always be available for future use, and when accumulated in sufficient number would lead to results which would be trustworthy, and belong to science.

You young men who are following the hospitals hardly know how much you are indebted to Louis.  I say nothing of his Researches on Phthisis or his great work on Typhoid Fever.  But I consider his modest and brief Essay on Bleeding in some Inflammatory Diseases, based on cases carefully observed and numerically analyzed, one of the most important written contributions to practical medicine, to the treatment of internal disease, of this century, if not since the days of Sydenham.  The lancet was the magician’s wand of the dark ages of medicine.  The old physicians not only believed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease, but they believed that each malady could be successfully attacked from some special part of the body,—­the strategic point which commanded the seat of the morbid affection.  On a figure given in the curious old work of John de Ketam, no less than thirty-eight separate places are marked as the proper ones to bleed from, in different diseases.  Even Louis, who had not wholly given up venesection, used now and then to order that a patient suffering from headache should be bled in the foot, in preference to any other part.

But what Louis did was this:  he showed by a strict analysis of numerous cases that bleeding did not strangle,—­jugulate was the word then used,—­acute diseases, more especially pneumonia.  This was not a reform,—­it was a revolution.  It was followed up in this country by the remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited Diseases, which has, I believe, done more than any other work or essay in our own language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery to the drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of the profession.

Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one of the attending physicians,—­yes, Louis did a great work for practical medicine.  Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend, and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and study.