8o PHYSIC 



it would appear that what is discovered of the etiology of 

 the disease is not its real cause or essence, but the remains 

 of some of its weapons of offence, bacterial developments, 

 embryonic survivals, and others, amid the surroundings 

 of pathological debris and debased function. 



Underlying and determining the fell work of cancer, as 

 well as rodent ulcer, we are deeply impressed with the 

 idea that primarily altered and disturbed dynamic equili- 

 brium is operative in bringing about the material pre- 

 pathological or preparatory conditions necessary for the 

 operation of the specific etiological factors, whatever they 

 be, and whenever they "assume the aggressive" ; without 

 this preparatory, disturbed and altered, dynamism, local 

 or general, we are strongly of opinion that no mal-forma- 

 tive or pathologically organic departure can take place in 

 any tissue or organ, and that no disease process can be 

 permitted to exist, so long as the physiological condition 

 of the organism, locally and generally, is maintained. 

 The conditions of tissue or organ, known as physiological 

 and pathological respectively, insensibly merge into each 

 other, and which, being taken as axiomatic, it follows that 

 in our investigation of diseased conditions such as cancer, 

 we must be prepared, along the debatable lines of structural 

 union, to turn over, first to one side and then to the other, 

 the structures involved, and to view them alternately as 

 physiological and pathological entities, in order that we 

 may arrive at scientifically justifiable, if not absolutely 

 correct, conclusions. It is an interesting but somewhat 

 disconcerting deduction to make from the theory of dis- 

 torted and altered dynamism, as a disease factor, that man 

 as well as all living organisms bears daily about with 

 him the elements of his own destruction, the letting loose 

 of which leads to the production of disease, and its con- 

 tinuance to death. Man is thus heir to two methods of 

 self-destruction, viz. autotoxis and auto- or neuro- 

 cution, to coin a term, depending on conditions, flowing 

 respectively from his material and dynamic component 

 parts in both their independent and related aspects and 

 bearings. The physiological working of vital energy on 

 organic plasma results, in the state known as health, in 

 normal growth and tissue sustenance, while the patho- 



