ABSTRACT
Medicine is essentially a practical art. It is the art of curing, mitigating, and preventing disease. Modern medicine is intimately connected with the biological sciences, with chemistry, and physics. Sickness, and indeed trouble of any kind, is apt to make people credulous. In their desperation even otherwise critical people are prone to try anything; and the majority of people are not critical. The advances of modern science were intimately bound up with the application of quantitative methods and the use of scientific instruments for the measurement of various physical quantities. The progress of medicine similarly depended on the adoption of quantitative methods and the use of suitable scientific instruments. The medicinal use of iron appears to have originated in astrological considerations. Iron was associated with Mars, the martial god of “blood and iron.” Salts of iron were accordingly prescribed for the anaemic and the weak; and they are in use as a tonic.
