TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BACTERIOLOGY 129 



its outer gateway of, for instance, such microbes as those 

 inciting typhoid fever and smallpox. 



That it is through the prowess of the body itself, and 

 not the skill and art of the physician, that recovery from 

 infectious disease takes place, had already become evident 

 to the ablest physicians of nearly one hundred years ago. 

 It is true that they could form no real conception of the 

 manner in which the cure was brought about, but in ad- 

 mitting the existence of a class of maladies which Jacob 

 Bigelow in 1835 called the "self-limiting diseases" * this 

 innate faculty of the organism to overcome infection was 

 recognized. It may be of even more than historical in- 

 terest to reprint here the pregnant paragraph in which 

 Bigelow expresses this view : 



This deficiency of the healing art (he is now writ- 

 ing of the advances in knowledge of the structure 

 and functions of the human body in contrast to the 

 lagging behind of the science of therapeutics, or the 

 branch of knowledge by the application of which 

 physicians are expected to remove diseases) is not 

 justly attributable to any want of sagacity or dili- 

 gence on the part of the medical profession. It be- 

 longs rather to the inherent difficulties of the case 

 and is, after abating the effect of errors and acci- 

 dents, to be ascribed to the apparent fact that certain 

 morbid processes in the human body have a definite 

 and necessary career, from which they are not to be 

 diverted by any known agents, with which it is in 

 our power to oppose them. To these morbid affec- 

 tions, the duration of which, and frequently the event 

 also, are beyond the control of our present remedial 

 means, I have, on the present occasion, applied the 

 name of the self -limited diseases; and it will be the 

 object of this discourse to endeavor to show the ex- 



1 Jacob Bigelow, Discourse on Self-limited Diseases, Boston, 

 1835. 



