Makers of Modern Medicine

The man who thus made a permanent place for himself in the history of medicine was the son of a poor shopkeeper in one of the outlying districts of Dublin. His early education was obtained at Maynooth College, which had at that time a department for the training of youth for secular vocations, though it has since become an exclusively clerical institution. It is needless to say he acquired an excellent knowledge of the classics, of which he made abundant use later in life, and of which he was always very proud. The physician in attendance at Maynooth in his time took quite a liking to him, and it was the result of his suggestion that Corrigan took up medicine as his profession. For a time he was under the tutelage of this Doctor O'Kelley, who seems to have been a very intelligent man, and a rather painstaking clinical observer. Most of his medical studies were made in Dublin and he attended the practice at Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital. It was the fashion at this time, however, for Irish students of medicine to finish their medical education at Edinburgh, whenever possible, and Corrigan spent several years there, receiving his degree of Doctor in Medicine in 1825.

He had attracted considerable attention in Edinburgh for his acute powers of observation, and received an appointment to the Meath Street Dispensary shortly after his return. From the service here he was appointed to the Jervis Street Hospital. He had to pay, however, for the privilege of being attending physician here, and this, as he said, made him more careful in endeavoring to secure all the advantages possible from his service.

After his publication of the article on "The Permanent Patency of the Mouth of the Aorta," or "Inadequacy of the Aortic Valves," he at once became recognized as one of the best clinicians in the city. This article appeared, in April, 1832, in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, at a time when, as has been said, its author was not yet thirty years of age. As soon as he began his work at the Jervis Street Hospital, he gave a course of lectures, and as he was an excellent talker and a good demonstrator, he at once attracted a large class. In 1834 he joined Hargrave's School, in Digges Street, Dublin, as lecturer on the practice of medicine, and continued to hold the position for more than ten years. His success as a lecturer attracted many students from the other medical schools. Corrigan's class was often three times as large as that of other medical lecturers in the city. It not infrequently happened that as a result of his popularity the medical class was two or even three times as large as the surgical and anatomical classes at the same institution. This was very unusual, for Dublin was famous for its anatomical instruction, and there were often five times as many pupils enrolled in the anatomy classes as in the medical classes.

It was not long before honors began to be showered upon Corrigan. When he was about forty the diploma of the London College of Surgeons was conferred upon him, and, as according to the by-laws of the institution the diploma can only be conferred after examination, Corrigan's examination was made to consist of the reading of the thesis, "Inadequacy of the Aortic Valves," before the faculty and the other members of the college. In 1849 the University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of M.D., honoris causa.

There was only one setback in Corrigan's medical career in Dublin. When first proposed for honorary fellowship in the Irish College of Physicians, he was rejected. The reason was entirely apart from medical matters. Corrigan was the most active member of the Irish Board of Health, which had charge of the famine cases in Ireland, during the awful years between 1845 and 1850. This Board proposed to allow about five shillings per day to physicians who would be sent to the country to attend famine fever cases. It is easy to understand that this remuneration was considered inadequate and the Board's decision in the matter raised a storm of protest. Graves wrote very bitterly with regard to it, and blamed Corrigan for any part he might have had in it. The result was that for some time Dr. Corrigan was the most popularly hated physician in the medical profession of Dublin.

Corrigan made, up for any lack of tact he might have had in this matter, however, before long, and in 1855 he obtained the license of the college. Two years later he was elected a Fellow. Before another two years had passed he was elected President of the College, and had the unprecedented honor of being re-elected four years in succession. The college further made up for its offense by having a statue of Dr. Corrigan, by the famous Irish sculptor Foley, made for its hall while he was still alive.

His own self-sacrificing work during the famine fever years was well known. After he had achieved nearly every distinction that his brother physicians could confer upon him, he was created a baronet. It was understood that this distinction was mainly meant as a reward for his services during the famine, though also for the time which he had so unstintedly given to the improvement of national education in Ireland, in the capacity of a Commissioner of Education.

Not long after his creation as a baronet, Sir Dominic stood, in Dublin, for a seat in Parliament in the Liberal interests. At first he was unsuccessful. In 1869, however, he was returned as one of the members of the government and sat in Parliament for five years. As he was a very eloquent speaker, it was thought that he would produce a very distinct impression in Parliament. His type of eloquence, however, did not prove to have any special influence in the cold British House of Commons, though Sir Dominic was always looked upon as one of the men to be counted on whenever there was under consideration legislation that affected Irish interests.

He was defeated for re-election in 1874, but it is rather to his credit than otherwise, since he had been approached by the vintners of Dublin, who were at that time all-powerful in municipal politics, and offered the membership, provided he would agree not to actively support the Sunday Closing Bill, which was to come up at the next session of Parliament. Such an agreement Sir Dominic absolutely refused to consider as consistent with his legislative honor, and the result was the close of his Parliamentary career.

His years in Parliament, however, did not separate him from his interests either in medicine or in general science. He continued to be especially interested in zoology and made liberal contributions to the Dublin Zoological Garden. His residence at Dalkey, the grounds of which ran down to a rocky coast line, enabled him to obtain many specimens for his aquarium, and these were often transferred to the Dublin Zoological Gardens, for which he was one of the most active collectors. It was his custom during his Parliamentary career, though he was more than seventy, to leave London on Friday night and reach Dublin about eight o'clock on Saturday morning. From the station he went directly to the Zoological Gardens and took part in the pleasant breakfast which the Council of Officers of the Zoological Society, with some invited guests, had there every Saturday morning. He was noted for his humor, and his presence at these breakfasts was always appreciated, because in spite of his advancing years he was sure to add to the pleasure of the occasion.

His friends feared that his Parliamentary career might prove a serious drawback to his health at his time of life, and their fears were not without foundation. He suffered severely from gout, which left its marks upon his feet and made it very difficult for him to walk for a time, and maimed him for all his after-life. Though a man who had worked very hard all his life and who, at the age of seventy, practically took up another career, that of politics, Sir Dominic lived to be nearly eighty years of age; thus illustrating the old aphorism that "it is not work but worry that kills," and furnishing another example of the fact that great men are great also in their superabundant vitality, and are able to spend their lives in the hardest kind of work, yet, barring accident, live on to an age beyond even that which is considered the average term of human existence.

Few men have had happier lives than Corrigan, if the high esteem of contemporaries can ever confer happiness. There was no honor in the gift of his Dublin professional brethren or of scientific bodies in which he was interested which was not conferred upon him. He was the president of the Royal Zoological Society, the president of the Dublin Pathological Society, of which he was one of the founders, and the first president of the Dublin Pharmaceutical Society. When not yet fifty years of age he was made physician in ordinary to the Queen in Ireland, and had the unapproached record of five elections to the presidency of the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Dublin–more than enough to make up for the one serious setback in his medical career, his black-balling by the college only a few years before. Foreign medical societies invited him to honorary membership and foreign universities conferred many degrees on him.

It is easy to understand then that his death was followed by tributes of the loftiest character to his professional work, to his standing as an influential member of the community and as a man of the highest intelligence and thoroughly conservative patriotism. The London Lancet said in its obituary: "By the death of Sir Dominic Corrigan, the medical profession loses one of its most conspicuous members, the University at Edinburgh one of its most illustrious graduates, and the Irish race one of its finest specimens. Though a perfect Irishman, Sir Dominic was as much at home in London, and though a sincere Catholic in religion, he had too much humor and too much humanity in his constitution to be a bigot. It were well for Ireland if all her public men displayed so much moderation, sense, and good humor as Sir Dominic habitually displayed in dealing with difficult and delicate questions."

About the same time the British Medical Journal said, after calling attention to the distinguished contemporaries with whom Corrigan had been associated, that he was "haud minimus inter magnos--not the least among the great ones." "Indeed," his biographer added, "in originality of conception which, confirmed by later and independent observation, is the true test of genius, in a correct appreciation of the operation of natural laws, in producing and modifying the phenomena of disease, in a rare aptitude for testing his hypotheses by actual experience, and in a forcible exposition of them, he probably had no equal among his contemporaries."

In the midst of all his honors and political influence, including association with the highest English officials in Ireland, Sir Dominic Corrigan had remained a consistent and faithful Catholic. Educated at Maynooth as a boy, he was proud to remain the physician to the college during many of the busiest years of his life when he must have often found it very difficult to spare the time to fulfil the duties attached to the position. He was the consultant physician till the end of his life. He is not even yet, after a quarter of a century, forgotten by the poor of Dublin, who recall his kindly help in affliction and his generous aid often given in ways that would be arranged with studied care so as not to hurt delicate Irish susceptibilities.

The Irish School of Medicine has in Graves and Stokes and Corrigan a greater group of contemporaries than has been given to any other nation at one time. If we were to eliminate from nineteenth century medicine all the inspiration derived from their work there would be much of value lacking from the history of medical progress. These men were deeply imbued with the professional side of their work as physicians, and were not, in any sense of the word, money-makers. Another very interesting phase in all their careers is that no one of them occupied himself exclusively with medical studies. All of them had hobbies followed faithfully and successfully together with medicine, and all of them were deeply interested in the uplifting of the medical profession, especially in securing the rights of its members and saving poor sick people from exploitation by quacks and charlatans. All of them gave of their time, their most precious possession, for the political and social interests of their fellow-men, and felt in so doing that they were only accomplishing their duty in helping their generation to solve the problem that lay immediately before it.

JOHANN MÜLLER, FATHER OF GERMAN MEDICINE

I say, then, that the personal influence of the teacher is able in some sort to dispense with an academical system, but that system cannot in any way dispense with personal influence. With influence there is life, without it there is none; if influence is deprived of its due position, it will not by those means be got rid of, it will only break out irregularly, dangerously. An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an Arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron university, and nothing else.

--Newman, Idea of a University.

Germany has come to occupy so large a place in progressive medicine during the last half-century that it is rather hard to conceive of a time when the Teutonic race was not the head and front of modern medical progress. The leadership that had existed in Italy for over five centuries only passed to Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first great leader in German medical thought was Johann Müller, and to the wonderful group of students that gathered around him German medicine owes the initiative which gradually forced it into the prominent place it still holds in the world of medicine. The great institutions of learning that have since come in Germany did not exist with anything like their modern systematic arrangement when Müller began his work. It was the marvellous influence of the man as a teacher, and not the scientific aids afforded by institutional methods, that brought forth the great generation of teachers which followed immediately on Müller's footsteps. Nowhere more than in the life of Müller can it be recognized with absolute certainty that the system and the institution count for little in education, as compared to the man and his methods.

The keynote of Müller's career, even more than what he did for biology, and for all the biological sciences related to medicine, is the wonderful conservatism of thought which characterizes his scientific conclusions, while at the same time he began the application of the experimental methods to medicine as they had never been applied before. At a time when physiologists, because of Woehler's recent discoveries of the possibility of the artificial manufacture of urea, might easily have been led to the thought that life counted for little in the scheme of the universe, Müller continued to teach consistently that vital energy may direct chemical or physical forces, but must not be confounded with them. It looked as if in the development of the chemistry of the carbon compounds, all of which are the result of life action, that materialistic views must be expected to prevail. Müller insisted, however, that life ever remains the guiding principle which rules and coordinates all the physical and chemical forces at play, within living organisms; and that the vital principle is entirely independent of these forces so closely attached to matter.

All Müller's disciples, and they were the representative biological scientists in Germany during the nineteenth century, followed closely in his footsteps in this matter, and the result was a conservatism of thought in biology in Germany that is the more surprising when we realize how much German philosophers in their systems emphasized the necessity for absolute independence from all previous systems of philosophical speculation. It is so much more interesting, then, to find what was the method of education that made of Johann Müller so conservative a thinker, while not injuring his genius for experimental observations. The influences that were at work in his earlier years were evidently those that made him subsequently the bulwark against materialistic tendencies in biology, and yet did not impair his originality. His early education was obtained under influences that are usually considered to be distinctly harmful to independence of thought, and yet they seemed to have helped him to the fulfilment of his destiny, as a great thinker and investigator. Müller is undoubtedly one of the very great men of modern science, and is the recognized founder of the system and methods of investigation which have given German medicine its present prominence and prestige.

In recent years there have been many tributes to Müller, because as Virchow's teacher it was considered that some of the praise for the work done by Virchow must naturally reflect on the man to whom the great German pathologist acknowledged that he owed so much of his inspiration and his training in methods of investigation. Virchow's death too very naturally led to the recall of what had been accomplished in German medicine during the nineteenth century, and for much of this Johann Müller must be considered as at least indirectly responsible, since to him so many of the great German medical scientists owed their early training. These men, all of them, did not hesitate to attribute the progress of German medicine to the methods introduced by Müller. At the beginning of the twentieth century something of the estimation in which he was held in a land far distant from the German Fatherland may be gathered from the following tribute paid to him in a recent meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York by Dr. C. A. L. Read, of Cincinnati, former President of the American Medical Association. In the midst of his panegyric of Virchow Dr. Read described in some detail the medical faculty of Berlin at the time when Virchow was beginning his work as a student at that University. He said:

"In the faculty there were Dieffenbach, the foremost surgeon of his day; Schoenlein, the great physician who had come from Zurich the same year to join, not only the teaching body, but to act as a reporting counsellor for the ministry and to serve as physician-in-ordinary to the King; Froriep, who was in charge of the Pathological Institute; Caspar, who was also medical counsellor, with a seat in the special deputation for medical affairs in the ministry; but towering above them all was the intellectual figure of Johann Müller, the Professor of Physiology. He was an original genius with daring, actually engaged in winnowing the wheat of demonstrated truth from the prevailing chaff of egoistic opinion which divorced physical science from speculative philosophy. Prompted by the inspiration which he had derived in turn from Bichat and the French school, the Professor of Physiology was busily retesting in the laboratory truths previously elaborated by Haller, Whytt, Spalanzani, Cullen, Prochaska, John Hunter, the Bells, Magendie, Berzelius and Bichat himself."

This is the tribute to Johann Müller, nearly fifty years after his death. That of Virchow, at his obsequies in Berlin, is even more enthusiastic. Virchow, then at the age of thirty-seven, at the height of his powers, already acknowledged the greatest of living pathologists, just recalled to Berlin to become Professor of Pathology in the University which he had left more or less in disgrace because of his political opinions, could not say too much of the teacher whom he respected and honored so highly and whose inspiration he felt stood for so much in his own career.

He said:

"My feeble powers have been invoked to honor this great man whom we all, representatives of the great medical family, teachers and taught, practitioners and investigators, mutually lament and whose memory is still so vividly with us. Neither cares by day nor labors by night can efface from our mind the sorrow which we feel for his loss. If the will made the deed, how gladly would I attempt the hopeless task of proper appreciation. Few have been privileged, like myself, to have this great master beside them in every stage of development. It was his hand which guided my first steps as a medical student. His words proclaimed my doctorate and from that spot, whence now his cold image looks down upon us, his kindly eyes beamed warmly upon me, as I delivered my first public lecture as Privat-Docent under his deanship. And, in after years, I was the one out of the large number of his pupils who, by his own choice, was selected to sit beside him within the narrow circle of the faculty.

"But how can one tongue adequately praise a man who presided over the whole domain of the science of natural life; or how can one tongue depict the master mind, which extended the limits of his great kingdom until it became too large for his own undivided government? Is it possible in a few short minutes to sketch the history of a conqueror who, in restless campaigns, through more than one generation, only made use of each new victory as a standpoint whereon he might set his feet and boldly look out for fresh triumphs?

"Yet such is the task to which we are called. We have to inquire what it was that raised Müller to so high a place in the estimation of his contemporaries; by what magic it was that envy became dumb before him, and by what mysterious means he contrived to enchain to himself the hearts of beginners and to keep them captive through many long years? Some have said–and not without reason–that there was something supernatural about Müller, that his whole appearance bore the stamp of the uncommon. That this commanding influence did not wholly depend on his extraordinary original endowments is certain, from what we know of the history of his mental greatness."

Virchow's tribute could not well be more enthusiastic or more ample. His appreciation has been the standard for all other medical opinions of the man. How much Müller is honored at the present time in Germany can be best appreciated from the number of times that his name is mentioned with respect and often with laudation in the proceedings of German medical societies. Scarcely a meeting passes in which more than once Johann Müller is not referred to as the founder of the scientific method in medicine which has given Germany her present position in the very forefront of medical scientific progress. It is a common expression, said half in jest it is true, but surely more than half in earnest, that the proceedings of no medical society would be really successful within the bounds of the German fatherland unless they were hallowed by an invocation of the great name of Johann Müller, the revered patron of modern German medicine. This is no witticism by exaggeration, after the American fashion, but a sincere Teutonic expression of feeling that occupies German medical minds with regard to the man who founded the most progressive school of modern medicine, and in doing so brought honor to his native country.

Johann Müller was born at Coblentz, on July 14, 1801. About six months before, the Emperor of Austria by the treaty of Luneville, signed February 9, 1801, ceded to the French Republic all the Austrian possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. The electors of Treves, who were archbishops and reigning princes and who had resided for centuries at Coblentz, by this treaty disappeared forever from the list of German rulers. When Johann Müller was born, French prefects of the Departments of the Rhine and Moselle took up their residence in the old town which had been, since the beginning of the French Revolution, a favorite dwelling place for the French nobility driven from their homes by fear of persecution.

Müller's father was a shoemaker and lived in a small house in the street of the Jesuits, so called because the fathers had had a school in it for many years. Johann was not destined to receive his education from the Jesuits, however, for the order had been suppressed nearly thirty years before his birth, and did not re-establish itself in the Rhineland for many years afterward. The circumstances of the Müller family were not such as to encourage hopes of a broad education, though his father seems to have taken every possible means to secure as much school training as could be obtained for his son. The early death of his father promised to deprive Müller of whatever advantages might have accrued from family sacrifices, but his mother was one of these wonderful women who somehow succeed in raising their families well and affording their children an education in spite of untoward circumstances.