Abstract
UP to quite modern days, the physician followed the strict Hippocratic tradition of concentrating his powers upon the welfare of the individual patient. He relied greatly, if not chiefly, upon rest in bed and upon the vis medicatrix naturae. He gave drugs for the palliation of symptoms, but had few, if any, weapons for attempting the specific cure of disease. His art, an art highly developed and refined, almost expended itself upon diagnosing accurately the exact process and the end result of the disease. I am not forgetting, of course, the exercise of his skilled functions in the right management of the patient's state of mind and in giving sympathetic and practical help to his friends—functions which in the physician's art at its best have always invested his office with a high nobility. But through the past generation, it has been his medical and non-medical colleagues in the scientific laboratory who have been putting into the physician's hands new weapons of precision, in the forging of which he has played little part himself and the mode of action of which he has to take largely upon trust.
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FLETCHER, W. Medical Research: The Tree and the Fruit1. Nature 124, 795–798 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124795a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124795a0