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came to the city his health began to fail, ascribable to ‘change of air.’ To 
stand on a street corner in a ‘spitter’s town,’ with clouds of dust blowing 
about, is a rather risky occupation. His children show an entirely different 
history from that of the ancestry, a long life history being displaced by 
a short one. The children die of the ‘diseases of civilization,’ and that 
means chiefly a bad sanitary environment. The offspring, instead of living 
to the age of sixty, seventy, or eighty years, die prematurely, eight out of 
twelve dying in childhood. 
Judging by or from the ancestral history, one can predict what the 
final termination in this case will be. One can predict—as well as that 
ean be done in complex biological predictions. Recently the man had a 
cerebral apoplexy which disabled him for a time, but he gradually re- 
covered; a continued high blood pressure means that before long there 
will be another apoplexy, in fact there may be several, until one is suffi- 
ciently severe to carry him off. : 
Some of my case histories cover a period of only a few years, but 
where much attention has been given, the thoroughness of study may 
offset the length of time. One can readily see that if an observer were 
to devote his attention, say for only a year, to the study of the life of an 
individual in chronic illhealth, much might be learned, more than where 
one attempts to cover an individual’s whole life in a superficial manner, 
and we can readily understand how a physician with many patients to 
look after can so scatter his attention with so little time for each that he 
simply cannot do his patients, or the subject, justice. 
People in health scarcely know what ilihealth means to one who has 
‘chronic illhealth,’ where the subject necessarily is more or less constantly 
in mind, and that certain symptoms—symptoms of illhealth, indicative of 
a reaction to a certain cause or to an abnormal environment—are present 
all the time, every hour of the day, and from one day to another. 
The individual in chronic illhealth naturally seeks relief; he applies 
to the physicians, and if the physicians do not understand the case and if 
no good results follow their treatment, the individual naturally applies 
elsewhere. Some chronics are constantly drifting from one physician to 
another and from one form of treatment to another, even the most out- 
landish. In the last month one of these ‘chronics’ came to me. On criti- 
cally studying the case, I found that she reacted to her environment, that 
is, in this case, to dust influences. The patient was intelligent; she 
promptly acted on my suggestions and many symptoms gradually vanished ; 
