"And medical science? You forget its beneficial achievements. And inoculation with bacteria! And modern surgical operations!" generally exclaim the defenders of science, who, as their last resort, bring forward the successes of medicine in proof of the fruitfulness of all science.
"We can by inoculation prevent disease and cure it, we can perform painless operations, we can cut open and treat the vital organs of the body, we can straighten deformity," generally say the advocates of science, thinking somehow, that a child cured of diphtheria (one out of thousands of children who, in Russia, independently of diphtheria, average a death rate of 50 per cent and in foundling asylums 80 per cent) must convince people of the usefulness of science in general.
The order of our life is such that not only children, but the majority of adults, through bad food, heavy, injurious work, bad dwellings, bad clothes, and many hardships, do not live half so long as they should; it is such that children's diseases, syphilis, consumption, and alcoholism are getting a firmer and firmer hold of men, that a great part of the results of men's labor is taken from them for preparations for war, and that every ten or twenty years millions of men are exterminated by war. And all this occurs because science, instead of spreading amongst men correct religious, moral, and social ideas which would cause all these calamities to disappear of themselves, is occupied on the one hand with the justification of the existing order, and on the other hand with playthings. And in proof of the fruitfulness of science we are reminded that it cures one out of a thousand of those invalids who in reality become ill precisely because science does not fulfil its natural function.
If even a small portion of its efforts, of that attention and toil which science devotes to the trifles it is occupied with, had been directed toward the development amongst men of correct religious, moral, social, and even hygienic notions, there would not have occurred a hundredth part of those diphtherias, women's diseases,
