Hermann Von Helmholtz
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the development of medicine were fast approaching their end. The methods were rejected, and the facts as well, and it was seen that medical science, like all the other sciences, had to be reconstructed. After physics and chemistry first shaped themselves on scientific lines in France in consequence of the epoch-making labours of Coulomb and Lavoisier, Mitscherlich and Liebig established chemistry as a science in Germany, while Ohm, Franz Neumann, Gauss, and Wilhelm Weber built up methods of experimental and mathematical physics upon a solid foundation. Yet it required a titanic labour to transfer these principles of methodic investigation from inorganic to organic Nature. After Ernst Heinrich Weber had demanded that vital phenomena should be explained in terms of physical processes, Johannes Muller endeavo
...ured in all his physiological work to clear the way for inductive methods of investigation, and to push deductive reasoning and metaphysical conceptions more and more into the background. But he could not emancipate himself from the notion of a separate, individual, vital force, distinct from the chemical and physical forces working within the organism, and capable of binding and loosing the action of the same. This is only abolished by death; the forces which it restrained are then set free, and produce corruption and putrefaction; the vital force has vanished, and is not replaced, nor converted into any other perceptible form of energy. Muller did not attempt to disguise the inconsistency of his position, and as a result the four gifted young investigators, BrGcke, du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Virchow, were all striving to develop a logical and unified physiology according to the principles of exact investigation. Each sought to abolish the notion of vital force from the ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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