OSTEOPATHY IN LINE OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION WITH MEDICINE.

Address Before the Graduating Class of February 1899, by Dr. J. MARTIN LITTLEJOHN, Ph. D., LL.D., F. S. Sc., F. R. S. L. (Lond.), Dean of the American School of Osteopathy.

TONIGHT I appear before you to offer you my own and my colleagues' congratulations upon this auspicious event in your history. After twenty months of careful study and patient waiting you have reached this climax in your career and now you are ready to go out into the arena of professional life to take part in the healing art. My greetings are offered to you in the spirit of one who has sympathy with you not only in your studies but now as you enter upon your professional career; and I trust you will accept of the assurance that our friendly sympathy and unbroken fellowship go out with you into life with the earnest desire that you may be successful and that your professional career maybe an honor to you, to us, your teachers, and that it may reflect great credit upon the science of Osteopathy.

As we look back over the past history of the healing art we are met at every point by controversy and bitter strife. As we survey these controversial struggles we are prone to ask, how far this modern age has been able to rise above the mere routine of dead orthodoxies and to look at the problems of medicine in the light of modern science and the improved methods of science. We must first learn that we have to deal with things, the actualities of life rather than mere words, that all that is gained must be reduced to the category of personal observation. To do this everything must be introduced into the fresh and living light of both facts and nature. This represents the modern spirit of scientific research, in virtue of which alone we can arise out of the dead dogmatisms of the past so as to make progress in knowledge and in art. This spirit is to be imbibed in the laboratory, the dissecting room and the hospital. To attain this there is the wide field of natural history opened up before you, because here you learn there is a true and a central unity in nature which we are apt to lose sight of in our specialization of departments of study. Even in the simple objects found lying in the petals of a flower we find depths of thought more practical and educative than all the scholastic contentions of 1,000 years. During the middle ages and to a large extent in ancient times the scientific method was exactly the opposite of this, designed to present to the mind the abstract and from the abstract to reason toward facts. Often the facts were not reached and then the process ended in a phraseology that meant nothing. Thus Democritus and Lucretius reduced the essential principles of all things to a concourse of atoms. The study of medicine was bound up for long ages in nominalism, the study of words and ideas of the mind taking the place of symptoms and causes of disease. The result of this occult nominalism is the polypharmacology of modern times, occult ideas requiring the occult qualities of medicine. It was only gradually that this occultism was laid aside. It came about by the study of external objects, rather than mere ideas or fanciful notions of things. Vesalius in the 16th century laid the foundation for the study of modern anatomy, followed by a long line of illustrious anatomists who paved the way for Harvey.

Other sciences have forged ahead fired by the enthusiasm of Galileo who ventured for the first time to speak of independent facts in regard to astronomy. Medicine alone during these passing centuries has been a laggard. The healing art continues to a large extent to be governed by precedents, largely because the art of medicine is steeped in antiquity and gathers most of its principles from a period that antedates the Christian era. Today the old school of medicine uses as it inherits the language of Cnidus, and it follows out the prognostics of Hippocrates. Today we realize that this is an age of knowledge, of the higher life and of the higher ideas and it is in this spirit that the last daughter of science, Osteopathy, raises her head and claims to inherit all that is good in the past history of the healing art. "They who want the necessaries of life want also a virtuous and an equal mind" said the Chinese sage. It is impossible in this age of progress to "go around in an eddy of purposeless dust."

THE CLIMAX OF ALL MEDICAL HISTORY:

It is here that Osteopathy comes in to claim the field, not as a restoration of any lost art, not by building up any system of mysticism, but in presenting itself to the world and to the medical profession in particular as the climax of all medical history. One thing that you, as graduates, must remember, is that you have to keep pace with advancing science. Constant worry and interruption incident to your professional life will tend to weaken the habits of continued and sustained attention to study. Physicians are apt to fall into routine habits, giving up all that is not absolutely necessary, abandoning professional reading or doing it only hastily. It is this that has brought the old school physician into such a bad condition today, because it is so easy to prescribe the first medicine offering itself without thinking of details, treating apparent symptoms without inquiring into the cause of the symptoms. This tends to perfunctory duty, the physician excusing himself on account of lack of time. We wish to emphasize the idea that it is the obligation of every Osteopathic physician to find or else to make the time necessary for doing this work. It is an imperious intellectual and moral necessity on the part of those who wish to be educated and advanced Osteopaths to keep up with the most advanced literature of the science. "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man."

These are the words of Bacon. It is this exactness that is one of the rarest qualities associated with him who is an expert in medical diagnosis. Medicine above all other branches of knowledge represents the feeling and expression of the age. It includes not only the science and the knowledge of the age but also the ignorance of the age. In each epoch we find the prominence of particular truths, the abstract preceding the concrete on account of the fact that the mind usually works within itself before it begins to work upon the external world.

The medical science is now passing from infancy to manhood, gathering up the copious generalizations of past history so as to subject them to the inductive examination necessary to their testing. Osteopathically we are attempting to reduce an art to a science. The elements in our hands are being shaped for future form. Although we can see only the meager outline of a nobler and higher structure, there is yet to be raised up by this upbuilding a larger science than any that has occupied the field in the past history of medicine. "To the father of all the ages let us commit this future, with humble yet courageous and unfaltering hope." Osteopathy presents to us all a fascinating study because in it we are concerned with the details of our physical and mental life.