EXTRACT III. 



HEALTH, DISEASE, AND DEATH. 



THESE are biological titles or terms under which we may 

 possibly be able to say something from the point of view 

 created by the views embraced in the preceding pages. 

 Health is a term of the greatest significance to the indi- 

 vidual and the community, and, generally speaking, its 

 attainment and retainment have been more or less earnestly 

 sought after by the human race in all ages and in all stages 

 of civilisation. 



A folk medicine has been practised usually in the first 

 place, from which professional medicine has ultimately 

 evolved itself as the progress of civilisation, has advanced, 

 the latter emanating from the former as the conditions of 

 society have become more complex and artificial the 

 purely empirical stage being left behind as accumulating 

 knowledge and the growing necessity for exactitude and 

 a reasoned faith have made themselves felt amid the strife 

 of human progress and the fitful advance of man's intel- 

 lectual acquirements and ambitions. Health may be 

 described as the condition of wholeness or "haleness" 

 resulting from the faultless working of the entire struc- 

 tures and organs of the body, or from the existence of a 

 bodily condition entirely in accordance with and emanating 

 from the working of physiological law and necessity ; 

 any departure from which constitutes a pathological con- 

 dition or disease. A pathological condition is therefore 

 a departure from the state of health due to the annulment 

 or negation of the state of ease characterising health, and 

 therefore is equal to a condition of disease. 



