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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



except in the most lamely empirical fashion, without a knowledge of 

 the properties of the organism and of its relations to its environment ; 

 for our medical function is to remove the disorder of these relations, 

 which is disease, and to restore the harmony, which is health. In past 

 times it has been too much the practice to treat the body as if it were 

 an entirely independent kingdom, without regard to its essential rela- 

 tions with surrounding Nature, and to try to drive out the enemy 

 which was supposed to have taken possession of it, by pills and po- 

 tions, as barbarous nations try to drive him out by charms and cere- 

 monies. Now, however, in the recognition of the intimate and con- 

 stant relations between the organism and its surroundings, we are 

 awaking to juster views of 'our duties as observers, and of our work 

 as curers of disease ; but it is because of the absence yet of anything 

 like exact knowledge in this respect that medical practice is defec- 

 tive, tentative, empirical, often mere guess-work, and that the most 

 experienced physicians, waiting patiently on Nature, aim to do the 

 least harm by the drugs which they employ. 



But we are perceiving more clearly, day by day, a larger applica- 

 tion of this principle of looking to the relations of man, to what is 

 around him as well as to what is within him, in the fulfillment of the 

 great purpose of preventing disease. It is in this direction that the 

 future course of medicine lies clearly open, and to this end that we 

 must work ; it will rise to the true height of its great vocation when 

 it watches over communities, and ministers to the welfare and devel- 

 opment of the race. I am apt to think that we shall attain to earlier 

 and larger success in preventing the diseases of communities than in 

 curing the diseases of the individual, as men who had been seeing 

 heavy bodies fall to the earth every moment of their lives discovered 

 the law of gravitation for the first time when they began to observe 

 the grand general motions of the heavenly bodies. Indeed, we have 

 already had encouraging success. Look through the yearly death- 

 list of this great city two hundred years ago, and you will find a large 

 proportion of deaths asciibed to diseases which have now been robbed 

 of their sting, if they are not quite extinct. Many persons died then, 

 as "that chief of men," Cromwell, did, from ague. Where is the 

 mortality of ague now? Ague has disappeared Avith the disappeai-- 

 ance, through better drainage, of the damp fogs which occasioned it, 

 as ghosts and other superstitions haA r e vanished with the disappear- 

 ance, before the light of knowledge, of the fogs of ignorance in which 

 they were engendered. Bloody-flux or dysentery seldom occurs now 

 in England, and is more seldom fatal, but it caused many deaths two 

 hundred years ago. The ravages of small-pox were then terrible, 

 hosts of victims being carried off by it, and many persons who escaped 

 death bearing its marks in blind eyes and hideously-scarred features ; 

 but I think we may foresee a time when,Keighley guardians notwith- 

 standing, small-pox will no more afflict a prudent people. Plague, 



