The Field of Clinical Science: Lord Nuffield's Gifts to Oxford

Abstract

MEDICINE as a charity for the sick poor has ±V1 for hundreds of years been entrusted with the gifts of kindly minded men and women. But the great advances in recent times of medical knowledge, whether directly won or derived from kindred sciences, have shown such promise of abundant help for all, rich and poor alike, that the gifts are now directed with a broader hope upon medicine itself. Such gifts, and they have followed one anotker in an astonishingly rich profusion since the beginning of this century, do not derive from a purely intellectual interest in science. Their aim is practical, for the welfare of humanity; they are guided by the sense that medicine itself, the instrument, must be sharpened with a keener power of penetration into the tangled problems of disease. Merely to multiply hospitals is not enough, for there is still substance to justify the indignant comment of Tristram Shandy's father on the physicians' motto, Ars longa, vita brevis, “Life is short, and the art of healing tedious; and who are we to thank for the one and the other but the ignorance of quacks themselvesand the stage loads of chymical nostrums, and peripatetic lumber, with which in all ages they have at first flattered the world, and at last deceived it”.