ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the chief discoveries and aids to discovery in collateral sciences which have brought medicine and preventive medicine to their present position. The development of medicine has waited on that of physical, chemical and biological sciences; but in the past the practitioners of medicine have been foremost in investigation of these branches of knowledge. Nicholas Copernicus was a physician, as well as an astonomer, whose discoveries revolutionized physical science. Galileo Galilei was a medical student when he discovered the law of the pendulum, using his pulse to time the movements of the pendulum. Many other illustrations will be found in Sir A. Garrod's The Debt of Science to Medicine, 1924. John Mayow, who practised medicine at Bath, came only one step short in the complete explanation of combustion and respiration. The progress of science in recent years has come largely through mechanical aids to vision. Of such aids the microscope has been essential to medical progress.
