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ronmentalists against sports utility vehicles last spring, a minister
held a sign that read "What Would Jesus Drive?"
Faith-based fear of science has a long history. As late as I854, doctors
in New York State were not permitted to dissect the human body in
medical schools. A statute called "The Bone Bill" passed the legislature
by a whisker, only after bitter controversy between defenders of "nat–
ural law" and proponents of medical science. The doctors pleaded that
Vesalius's great dissection atlas
De Humanis Corporis Fabrica
had been
used as a manual by medical students in more enlightened parts of the
world since I543 . But in I854,
Harper's Monthly
argued the anti–
dissection cause in phrases that sound very much like the Bush admin–
istration's stand against therapeutic cloning:
Science may prove ever so clearly that there is nothing there but
carbon, oxygen, and lime ... but all this can never eradicate the
sentiment we are considering, and that is too deeply in our laws of
thinking, our laws of speech, our most interior moral and religious
emotions.
Interior moral and religious emotions yielded to medical science when
antebellum Manhattan finally caught up with Renaissance Brussels. The
driving spirit behind the Bone Bill was no other than John William
Draper, founder and first president of New York University School of
Medicine, who argued:
The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries.
It is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers-the
expansive force of the human intellect on one side and the com–
pression arising from traditional faith and human interest on the
other. As large a number of persons now live to seventy years as
lived to forty, three hundred years ago.
I would note that mean longevity in the United States in I840 was about
forty years. By the I980s, it was approaching eighty years. That dou–
bling of human longevity, as Draper would have been the first to argue,
can hardly be credited to major increments in "our most interior moral
and religious emotions."
Draper not only wrote a book that became the
machine de guerre
of
free thought for the better part of a century, but as Professor of Chemistry
at NYU, shared with Samuel
F.
B. Morse, a professor of Fine Arts at
NYU, the honor of producing the first daguerreotype portraits by an
