Excerpt from The Birth and Growth of Science in Medicine: Being the Harveian Oration Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians of London, October 18th, 1920 It is natural that, as a pathologist, I should take the more purely scientific aspect of medicine as the subject of my discourse, and it will be proper in the first place to consider the position which medicine occupies amongst the sciences. We are accustomed to speak of the art and science of medicine, perhaps without reflecting upon where the art begins and the science leaves off. A body of facts in any branch of knowledge, however thoroughly their truth has been established, does not of itself constitute a science. Science lies in the way the facts are treated. They need to be classified and viewed in their mutual relations: then, by appropriate reasoning, it is sought to formulate the general laws which govern the province of Nature studied. The aim of science is to discover the Laws of Nature, and in its truest though narrowest sense it is the pursuit of this knowledge for its own sake, irrespective of any practical use to which it may be put. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.