94 THE NEW PHYSIOLOGY. 



regulation has but little direct reference to medicine, 

 and can be of relatively little help. A capable doctor 

 has to neglect, to a large extent, the physiology he has 

 been taught, and he has to make for himself a new, and 

 often very crude, physiology. 



If modern teaching of physiology is defective, so, to 

 a far larger extent, is that of anatomy. Human anatomy 

 frankly professes to deal only with the gross structure 

 exhibited by dead bodies, whereas medicine has to deal 

 with the living body. Now, it makes all the difference 

 whether the body is alive or dead. The living body 

 maintains, by a process of ceaseless and exquisitely 

 regulated activity, the appearance which we call its 

 structure. In disease the regulation is disordered, and 

 in the process of recovery we see the restoration of this 

 regulation. But anatomy disregards completely both 

 the activity and the regulation of it. It frankly does 

 not profess to tell us anything about the conditions 

 which determine the fact that normal and not abnormal 

 structure is present. Of the possible presence of a vis 

 sculptrix corresponding to the vis medicatrix it has never 

 even heard. " Natural selection or a Creator have 

 just made structure what it is," say the anatomists, 

 " and we cannot give any further information." The 

 medical man has to struggle how he can to solve the 

 problems which arise when either disease or he himself 

 interferes with normal structure. Anatomy does not 

 stretch out even a finger to help him in this struggle 

 it deals only with the dead. What help there is comes 

 from experimental embryology and physiology, the 

 recent work of the Edinburgh Physiological School 

 being specially prominent in this direction. In this 



