"Albert Einstein. The world as I see it (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

I was a free man, bound neither by many duties nor by harassing
responsibilities; my friend, on the contrary, was never free from the grip
of urgent duties and anxious fears for the fate of those in peril. If, as
was invariably the case, he had performed some dangerous operations in the
morning, he would ring up on the telephone, immediately before we got into
the boat, to enquire after the condition of the patients about whom he was
worried; I could see how deeply concerned he was for the lives entrusted to
his care. It was marvellous that this shackled outward existence did not
clip the wings of his soul; his imagination and his sense of humour were
irrepressible. He never became the typical conscientious North German, whom
the Italians in the days of their freedom used to call bestia seriosa. He
was sensitive as a youth to the tonic beauty of the lakes and woods of
Brandenburg, and as he sailed the boat with an expert hand through these
beloved and familiar surroundings he opened the secret treasure-chamber of
his heart to me-he spoke of his experiments, scientific ideas, and
ambitions. How he found time and energy for them was always a mystery to me;
but the passion for scientific enquiry is not to be crushed by any burdens.
The man who is possessed with it perishes sooner than it does.

There were two types of problems that engaged his attention. The first
forced itself on him out of the necessities of his practice. Thus he was
always thinking out new ways of inducing healthy muscles to take the place
of lost ones, by ingenious transplantation of tendons. He found this
remarkably easy, as he possessed an uncommonly strong spatial imagination
and a remarkably sure feeling for mechanism. How happy he was when he had
succeeded in making somebody fit for normal life by putting right the
muscular system of his face, foot, or arm! And the same when he avoided an
operation, even in cases which had been sent to him by physicians for
surgical treatment in cases of gastric ulcer by neutralizing the pepsin. He
also set great store by the treatment of peritonitis by an anti-toxic
coli-serum which he discovered, and rejoiced in the successes he achieved
with it. In talking of it he often lamented the fact that this method of
treatment was not endorsed by his colleagues.

The second group of problems had to do with the common conception of an
antagonism between different sorts of tissue. He believed that he was here
on the track of a general biological principle of widest application, whose
implications he followed out with admirable boldness and persistence.
Starting out from this basic notion he discovered that osteomyelon and
periosteum prevent each other's growth if they are not separated from each
other by bone. In this way he succeeded in explaining hitherto inexplicable
cases of wounds ailing to heal, and in bringing about a cure.

This general notion of the antagonism of the tissues, especially of
epithelium and connective tissue, was the subject to which he devoted his
scientific energies, especially in the last ten years of his life.
Experiments on animals and a systematic investigation of the growth of
tissues in a nutrient fluid were carried out side by side. How thankful he
was, with his hands tied as they were by his duties, to have found such an
admirable and infinitely enthusiastic fellow-worker in FrДlein Knake! He