94 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
they
merge into the simple tumours, and that any portion of the life-cycle of
normal development may manifest itself as a tumour.
From
the above it may have become manifest that for the elucidation of the nature of
the tumours two things are needed: pathology, a much feted and daily more and
more endowed branch of learning; and embryology, the science of the
coming-into-being of life, at present the handmaid of many sciences, and almost
without a habitation to call its own.* This despised and rejected branch of
human knowledge, whose task it is to treat of the “Werden und Vergehen “of
living things, is in importance second to none. Without its light, much
possible knowledge in other sciences is enshrouded in thick, pitchy darkness ;
without it one branch of pathology at least could have no real scientific
existence. In certain directions we may turn to pathology for the collection
of the facts, but to embryology for their explanation. The pathologist may know
the facts, but that knowledge gives him no key to their solution; for this lies
in the study of the normal development of living things— embryology.
* Eighteen years ago
there died an English embryologist, a wealthy man, who had for years devoted
some of his means towards the advancement of science. In the medical faculty,
in which he taught, embryology was lectured upon by five different medical
professors to large classes of students, while he, a specialist, had
practically no students. His course was not prescribed in the regulations.
Embryology is to-day (1911) in Great Britain not one of the courses laid
down in the curriculum for medical students. In scientific Germany it is
otherwise, and in my own University of Freiburg-in-B., although the medical
faculty contains fewer students than in more than one British medical school,
my old friend Professor Franz Keibel has as many as 150 medical students
every summer in his lectures upon comparative embryology. His laboratory
for practical embryology is so crowded with medical students that a year ago,
when visiting Freiburg, I was informed that he was at his wits’ end what to do
with them.