In all the employments
which are dependent in any degree upon the political economy of nations,
this tendency is too obvious to have been overlooked. Accordingly it has
long been noticed for congratulation in manufactures and the useful arts--
and for censure in the learned professions. We have now, it is alleged, no
great and comprehensive lawyers like Coke: and the study of medicine is
subdividing itself into a distinct ministry (as it were) not merely upon
the several organs of the body (oculists, aurists, dentists,
cheiropodists, &c.) but almost upon the several diseases of the same
organ: one man is distinguished for the treatment of liver complaints of
one class--a second for those of another class; one man for asthma--
another for phthisis; and so on. As to the law, the evil (if it be one)
lies in the complex state of society which of necessity makes the laws
complex: law itself is become unwieldy and beyond the grasp of one man's
term of life and possible range of experience: and will never again come
within them. With respect to medicine, the case is no evil but a great
benefit--so long as the subdividing principle does not descend too low to
allow of a perpetual re-ascent into the generalizing principle (the
[Greek: _to_] commune) which secures the unity of the science. In
ancient times all the evil of such a subdivision was no doubt realized in
Egypt: for there a distinct body of professors took charge of each organ
of the body, not (as we may be assured) from any progress of the science
outgrowing the time and attention of the general professor, but simply
from an ignorance of the organic structure of the human body and the
reciprocal action of the whole upon each part and the parts upon the
whole; an ignorance of the same kind which has led sailors seriously (and
not merely, as may sometimes have happened, by way of joke) to reserve one
ulcerated leg to their own management, whilst the other was given up to
the management of the surgeon.
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