Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 143
Delivered as the Annual Address on Medicine before the Wisconsin
State Medical Society.
Printed, Western Clinical Recorder, July, 1899.
I
THE RATIONAL DIAGNOSIS
OFFER no apology for bringing to your attention an
address which suggests in its title a speculative cast.
In this day of clamorous facts and urgent needs of
practical processes, we have little time to spare for theoretical
disquisition. We may be fundamentally scholastic, but the
demand of to-day is that we utilize our knowledge. In
full recognition of these facts, I emphasize the proposition
that never was there so much material nor scope for medical
reasoning as at this moment.
It is hardly necessary to point to the array of forces which
have to be marshaled to effective power. Centuries of
clinical experience, descriptive observation, and empiric
procedure have poured forth their contribution to the cause
of humanity. Hardly a score of years have sufficed to put
this mass of medical knowledge into vibration, whose only
end must be readjustment and harmonizing of data. Great
as is the marvel of the new era, greater is the marvel in
the rapidity and eagerness with which medical minds have
grasped the truth and molded themselves to its teaching,
though it be subversive of every preconception and destructive
of accumulated formulae.
Nothing, however, is lost; every fixed relation, every
established law, all the contributions of our predecessors,
more or less misinterpreted, are the material out of which
to rear the structure of scientific medicine under the illumination
of modem thought.
No other field offers the wealth of opportunity here to
be found. No period in its history compares, in its fruitfulness,
with the present.
Like all revolutions, the activity of the last few years