Excerpt from Clinical MedicineFloated in on my desk from circumambient space this pithy sentence: - "The people who are not up on a thing are usually down on it." Then came a report from a medical society wherein a worthy old doctor remarked that he had never used the active principles and did not believe in them.When men or - rather women - first began to wear clothes there were those who did not believe in them. The desert Arab now looks with contempt on his cousin who has forsaken the tent and dwells within four walls. The man who left the chase for wild animals and herded domestic ones was a degenerate to his fellows; but he agreed with them in his contempt for those who sought to cultivate the soil. Europe described America as one enormous counter at which stood our fathers with goods to sell; but her princes marry the merchants' daughters. The southern planter termed the north a race of base mechanics, and lost for lack of mechanics.Every advance step in the progress of the race from savagery has been deemed a degenerative one by the conservative who does not feel the impulse to move along. The history of medicine is one unbroken series of illustrations of this principle of human psychology. Why should we expect the present generation to be exceptional in this respect and to act as no previous generation ever did. We don't. This is not an exceptional age. Mankind alters the cut of garments, sartorial and mental. Man adopts new creeds, he acquires newly discovered facts by the bushel, he expands the limits of his knowledge and his powers in every direction, but at heart he is the same old man who lived in the days of Solomon, and ages before that wise king.The first sentiment with which a physician, old enough and experienced enough to have settled views of his own, receives a radically different idea, is of repulsion. "I know what I know; and this thing does not harmonize with it. If true, I have been mistaken in some of my mos…