12 IRRITABILITY 



and strengthening of the function. No function other than the 

 physiological, even under the greatest pathological alterations, 

 exists in any structure of the body. 'The muscle does not per- 

 ceive, the nerve moves no bone, the cartilage does not think." 

 In this way Virchow rediscovered in the domain of pathology 

 the law that his great teacher, Johannes Midler, had already 

 clearly established in the field of physiology. But this law can 

 no longer be applied to all pathological disturbances of the nutri- 

 tive and formative activities of the cell. Here processes occur 

 which do not consist of a quantitative change of the normal 

 phenomena, but in the appearance of wholly foreign states, as 

 in the case of amyloid degeneration or heteroplastic tumors. 

 The question today and for the future arises, therefore, as to 

 where the limits of the validity of the law of the specific energy 

 of living substances are to be placed, a question closely con- 

 nected with the other before mentioned, of the relations between 

 functional and cytoplastic metabolism. 



By means of cell pathology Virchow has laid the foundations 

 upon which our modern medical attitude is built and which must 

 remain essentially forever the basis of all future medical thought. 

 Certain critics, lacking in appreciation of the interrelations 

 between things and ignoring the safer and established knowledge, 

 have considered, in view of the unfoldings of the researches on 

 immunity and of serum therapy, that the time of cell-pathology 

 was passed and must be replaced by the humoral-pathological 

 teaching. These ultramodern critics, however, have here com- 

 pletely ignored the fact that, on the one hand, the life of our 

 body is built up from the life of all of the contained cells, for 

 life in our body exists only in the cells ; and on the other, a fact 

 not considered by them is that the components of the body fluids 

 originate from vital activity of the cells either directly or indi- 

 rectly. No result, indeed, of present serology can alter in the 

 least degree the fact that every disease represents only a disturb- 

 ance of the physiological processes of cell life of the organism 

 and the harmony in their combined workings. Indeed the more 

 recent observations of serology and chemotherapy are so little 

 opposed to cell-pathology that they are in fact only possible when 



