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We further believe that to-day is the time when an attempt should be made to construct, out of the clinical materials that are now in our possession and that have been brought together with great care and without bias, a positive science, a science which in the course of time cannot fail to lead to sound therapeutic methods. This is what we mean by the expression “Physiological Medicine.”

Up to this point in his article Wunderlich says nothing to which any of my readers are likely to object. Quite the contrary; the first impression which the text makes is something like this: At last Wunderlich has discovered a road by following which closely one may eventually develop a really scientific practical medicine. But, when one reaches the end of the article, one can scarcely fail to experience no small degree of disappointment on finding that it does not furnish the slightest evidence of the manner in which the author’s seemingly admirable scheme is to be realized; nor—as we are assured by Petersen—is any further enlightenment upon this subject to be found in any of the succeeding volumes, either in the seven which were published under the joint editorship of Wunderlich and Roser, or in those which were issued after Wilhelm Griesinger had been accepted as an associate in the management of the Archiv. The old evil which carried Broussais as it were by storm into the dictatorship of medical thinking and of medical practice in France was here being reëstablished in Germany. Men seemed to find it impossible to go on patiently collecting facts; they could not resist the temptation to build theories first. So far at least as the treatment of disease is concerned, we are forced to admit that the collecting of any large body of facts is well-nigh an impossibility. Only after the lapse of very many years would it be possible to realize the desirable results which Wunderlich had in mind.