THE POPULAR TERM "SICKNESS" 23 



of the greatest number, and to the most lasting 

 extent. 



Sickness is a term evidently of great antiquity, and we 

 should suppose it has existed in a general or more or less 

 concrete form in every language and dialect that has been 

 spoken since Adamic times ; moreover, it is likely, not- 

 withstanding the use of every means to extinguish it, to 

 continue to be a well-understood term, if its meaning 

 is only casually realised, until the physical nature of man 

 undergoes a radical change through the elimination of 

 discordant influences and the growth of such as make for 

 perfection. 



The term sickness is far-reaching in its meaning, but 

 most indefinite in its true and exact appreciation, inasmuch 

 as every individual man and woman who is asked for a 

 description of it gives a different account of its intrinsic 

 effects upon him or her, and of the character of the 

 phenomena, physical and mental, of which it is composed. 

 Although, therefore, it may be regarded as the first, and 

 more or less ever recurrent, ailment of humanity, in its 

 essence it is less understood than any morbid experience 

 from which it suffers, it would thus seem that we must 

 still wait for a scientifically true estimate of its nature 

 and incidence until the sciences constituting the founda- 

 tions of descriptive medicine have been placed in the 

 category of the more, if not most, exact. 



Meantime, it behoves us, however, to endeavour to 

 form some estimate of what it is, however imperfect, in 

 order that we may be able to prevent or to neutralise its 

 attacks on somewhat more exact lines and principles than 

 those which have hitherto served us. What is it then? 



Sickness, bodily, seems to us to be primarily a nervine 

 ailment, and to arise out of, in most cases, a disturbed 

 condition of the non-nervous or sympathetically inner- 

 vated elements and textures situated, roughly speaking, 

 at and around the epigastric region, where the great auto- 

 matic ganglionic or sympathetio-systemic nervature reaches 

 its most highly organised and complex functional develop- 

 ment, and where the phenomena of peristalsis and anti- 

 peristalsis radiate from and are maintained for the highest 

 physiological purposes and organic necessities, and any 



