108 THE PROTEOMORPHIC THEORY AND THE NEW MEDICINE 



he had tested the genetic relationship of hundreds of species of 

 animals, had recently won him Fellowship in the Royal Society 

 a distinction shared, I believe, by no other American. 



With the work of these men I had, of course, long been 

 familiar. Some of the men I had known for years, and visited 

 on previous occasions. But at this time I was making an espe- 

 cial effort to correlate the new advances along different lines of 

 science in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology. A little 

 later I sought, through correspondence, the opinions of a thou- 

 sand leading men of science, actual workers in one field or an- 

 other, as to what, in their judgment, was the most important 

 unexplored or half-explored field just ahead. By co-ordinating 

 these diversified opinions, I thought to attain a clearer view than 

 had hitherto been possible of the trend of scientific thought in 

 our day and the probable eventualities of the new scientific era 

 on the threshold of which we stand. 



It was these studies, doubtless, combined with the earlier in- 

 vestigations that had found expression in my History of Science, 

 that made possible the crystallization of ideas in my mind rep- 

 resented by the Proteomorphic Theory. The actual textual for- 

 mulations of that theory at the particular time when it was 

 written came about through the accident of my being asked to 

 make a summary of existing theories of immunization. The 

 mental co-ordination through which the new and in a sense revo- 

 lutionary tenets of the Proteomorphic .Theory flashed into my 

 mind eventuated, rather curiously, one evening as I sat at din- 

 ner with my daughter in a little restaurant down in llth Street. 

 The dictating of the twenty-five thousand words of copy com- 

 prised in the presentation of the theory in American Medicine 

 was a tour de force begun and completed in the leisure hours 

 of three or four consecutive days.* But the connotations of the 



*I would not seem to imply that the writing of this amount of matter 

 in the time mentioned constitutes an unusual task. A few months before 

 the Proteomorphic theory was written I had dictated more than half a 

 million words of finished manuscript (making eleven fair-sized volumes) 

 and turned the manuscript over to the printer in a period of fifty con- 

 secutive days. On almost numberless occasions I have written from 

 twelve thousand to fifteen thousand words of finished manuscript per day 

 for days together. One of my large books was begun on Monday morning 

 and finished Saturday night of the same week. Another (Volume I of my 

 History of Science) was produced in the midst of exacting duties of a 

 different character by dictating one hour daily (eight to nine in th< 

 morning) for twenty consecutive days. I mention these incidents tc 

 illustrate an habitual tendency to concentrated mental action, in explana- 

 tion of the seeming anomaly that so comprehensive and even revolutionarj 

 a doctrine as that comprised in the Proteomorphic theory should have 

 been produced rather as a mental pastime than as a fixed task. I majl 

 add, however, that the aftermath of the "mental pastime" in question 

 has involved me in a series of laborious investigations, of which this 

 volume gives some intimations, that will probably occupy a large part 

 of my time for the remainder of my life. 



