ne
fact proved to be very striking. It is that discoverers of really
great truths are practically always what we would call young men, and
what older men are apt to think of as scarcely more than mere boys.
Such men as Morgagni, the Father of Pathology; Laennec, the Father of
Pulmonary Diagnosis; Stokes, who taught us so much about the lungs;
and Corrigan, who laid the foundation of exact knowledge in heart
diseases,--were under twenty-five when they made their primal
discovery, and some of them scarcely more than twenty. Vesalius
published his great work on anatomy when he was not yet thirty, and
Stensen did his best work under twenty-five. When such men attempt to
teach their elders, of course they are properly put in their places by
their elders, and this often includes a good deal of bitter satire and
discouragement. It is the eternal conflict between youth and age that
constitutes the main reason for opposition to progress in any form of
knowledge, for youth will be progressive and age will be conservative.
Unfortunately age often dissembles the reasons for its opposition even
to itself, and religion and common sense and supposedly established
principles of science are all appealed to as contradicted by the new
doctrine introduced by young men, the truth of which their elders
cannot see.

Nor must it be thought that the second half of the nineteenth century
was free from this tendency to persecute those who made advances in
medicine. There is probably no form of treatment which, in the minds
of those who know most about the disease, that has done more to save
awful suffering in mankind than the Pasteur treatment for rabies.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the introduction of
that treatment will not be likely to forget how much of pain {410} and
suffering the discovery and introduction of it cost its author.
Nothing too bitter could be said by the medical profession of Germany
for many years after the treatment was first broached. One of the most
distinguished of German medical discoverers in the nineteenth century
said, in a very climax of satire, "that the distinguished Frenchman
deserved to be well known as one who treated diseases of which he knew
nothing by remedies of which he knew less." His good faith was
impugned, his statistics scorned, his results laughed at, even his
friends hesitated to say anything on the subject. Those who were close
to Pasteur know that he suffered, for his nature was