Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/81

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XI.
THE RANGE OF PAINLESS RESEARCH.

'I AM content to let Nature do all the torturing, and man all the relieving. . . . The grandest physiology and physiological discovery exist outside every shade of painful experiment.'[1]

These are the words of one of our wisest physicians, deliberately written in the full maturity of a life devoted to original research and its practical application to medicine. His experience led him to the recognition of this great truth: that the supreme aim of the medical profession must become more and more the advancement of sanitation. In any comprehensive view of medical art as a science, the cure of disease is rationally secondary to its prevention.

  1. See 'Biological Experimentation,' by Sir B. W. Richardson. Bell and Sons.