Armstrong – Table of Contents

enthusiasm demonstrated how to “coax nature into revealing her secrets with a minimum
of equipment” and the “influence of their inspiration has persisted.”
He continued that hand-in-hand with the teaching of known facts, combined or
dependant upon preliminary training, goes research or the acquisition of new truths. The
twin sisters of education and research, he observed, had brought tremendous material
advantages. Within the previous five or six decades, truly extraordinary inventions had
appeared. These included man’s heavier than air flight, the airplane, the internal
combustion engine automobile, the motorcycle, the electric light, the telephone, the
elevator, the typewriter, x-ray machines, radiation treatments, anaesthetics, vaccines, and
public health sanitary measures to control epidemics.
Through these and other discoveries that had gone far to alleviate the burdens of
toil and suffering in the world, the inventors and discoverers had won honor, respect and
often substantial monetary rewards for their achievements. Scientists and inventors had
often not fared well in previous eras when they challenged accepted dogma. Examples in
astronomy include Copernicus and Galileo. In medicine, Vesalius, the father of anatomy,
became disgraced and vilified during the 16th century when he questioned the archaic
concepts of the Greek physician, Galen, whose teachings had kept medical knowledge in
bondage for 1300 years. Vesalius challenged the accepted knowledge of human anatomy.
He felt that truth could only be obtained by going to nature itself in order to elucidate
anatomical relationships by direct observation from human dissection. Civil authorities
and the church, represented by the Inquisition, persecuted Vesalius because of his
anatomical investigations. He died alone disgraced and unbefriended but his
contributions to medicine were accepted posthumously with profound appreciation.