Granting all this, we must not expect too much from “science” as distinguished from common experience.  There are ten thousand experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the laboratory.  Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist.  Battle is the great vivisector.  Hunger has instituted researches on food such as no Liebig, no Academic Commission has ever recorded.

Medicine, sometimes impertinently, often ignorantly, often carelessly called “allopathy,” appropriates everything from every source that can be of the slightest use to anybody who is ailing in any way, or like to be ailing from any cause.  It learned from a monk how to use antimony, from a Jesuit how to cure agues, from a friar how to cut for stone, from a soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to keep off scurvy, from a postmaster how to sound the Eustachian tube, from a dairy-maid how to prevent small-pox, and from an old market-woman how to catch the itch-insect.  It borrowed acupuncture and the moxa from the Japanese heathen, and was taught the use of lobelia by the American savage.  It stands ready to-day to accept anything from any theorist, from any empiric who can make out a good case for his discovery or his remedy.  “Science” is one of its benefactors, but only one, out of many.  Ask the wisest practising physician you know, what branches of science help him habitually, and what amount of knowledge relating to each branch he requires for his professional duties.  He will tell you that scientific training has a value independent of all the special knowledge acquired.  He will tell you that many facts are explained by studying them in the wider range of related facts to which they belong.  He will gratefully recognize that the anatomist has furnished him with indispensable data, that the physiologist has sometimes put him on the track of new modes of treatment, that the chemist has isolated the active principles of his medicines, has taught him how to combine them, has from time to time offered him new remedial agencies, and so of others of his allies.  But he will also tell you, if I am not mistaken, that his own branch of knowledge is so extensive and so perplexing that he must accept most of his facts ready made at their hands.  He will own to you that in the struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts as in the outside world of nature, much that he learned under the name of science has died out, and that simple homely experience has largely taken the place of that scholastic knowledge to which he and perhaps some of his instructors once attached a paremount importance.