13 



With so much of evil resulting from the war, it is a 

 due to War satisfaction to find some good results from it. The 



Lancet states that, in Great Britain, functional 

 nervous diseases among the civil population practically disappeared. 

 In Vienna, it was found that all degrees of diabetes were favourably 

 influenced; in males almost without exception and in females, 

 frequently but not universally. Whereas not one of 39 slight diabetics 

 before the war could be regarded as cured, 2)?) out of 39 became 

 sugar-free under war conditions. 



The Lancet does not speculate why these good effects were 

 produced. The starvation method of treating diabetes- may throw 

 some light on the matter, but it is also not improbable that the great 

 mental and nervous strain involved in the concentratio»i of the mind 

 on outside circumstances may have reacted favourabhy upon the 

 whole economy. 



Work of ^^ ^^^ other hand, many nervous affections, that 



British Medical it is customary to call 'shell shock,' have affected 

 esear oun i ^^^ soldiers. As a result of the work of the British 

 Medical Research Committee, it is now possible to take a wider 

 and a more hopeful view of the nervous diseases of the war. 

 Incidentally, mental disease generally has passed from the region 

 of mere expectancy to a reasonable anticipation of beneficial results 

 under proper treatment. Here, again, the war has left a legacy 

 of benefit. 



The London Times points out that, during the last 

 Diagnosis^ ^ ^°^^ years, a new medicine, which fundamentally 



alters the whole attitude to disease, has arisen. A 

 few years ago disease was supposed to be either acute or chronic, 

 infectious or non-infectious, curable or incurable. The patient was 

 said to have dyspepsia or lumbago or Bright's disease or any other 

 disease. 



In so stating it, the doctor was, as a rule, only saying that a 

 certain organ had broken down and had become the seat of 'fibrous 

 change,' just as the feet become the seat of fibrous change when 

 corns grow on them. In that conception, the fibrous change consti- 

 tuted the whole disease and was not, as we now know, one of the 

 results of the disease. Doctors thought of the heart or liver or lungs 

 when they should have been thinking of great bodily changes due to 

 assaults upon the whole organism. 



Bacteriology has demonstrated that infection wiih 

 Advances in . . .n .. • . • n i 



Bacterioloey ' certain germs will result in certain ribrous chaiigos 



which we call disease. Though it had boon rocogni/etl 



that such diseases as tuberculosis and syphilis were of bacterial 



