1238 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Vaidic and the Unani systems, and with doctrines, drugs, and 

 modes of treatment frequently different, and often anything but 

 convincing to the European mind. Still, their respective percentage 

 of cures is generally reckoned not so far below that of western 

 physicians; though, of course, these remind us, with justice, that 

 they often get the graver cases, and many past hope. Both these 

 old systems admittedly derive from ancient Greece ; so here may be 

 promise of light on medical history, as well as suggestions from their 

 apparent successes, as with drugs or decoctions by us still too little 

 known. So, too, the homely practices and experiences of the people 

 in other countries have often yielded invaluable suggestions; thus 

 Jenner was started to vaccination by the village milkmaid. Pasteur's 

 amazingly productive career was developed — as he well knew, even 

 to his dying words — from his origins as a tanner's boy, impressed 

 to reflection by the daily experience of decay prevented by anti- 

 septics; and Lister was not only his disciple, but the living re-em- 

 bodiment of the old-world "shepherd, with his tar-box by his side". 

 Nor can these be the last cases of this old-knowledge and wisdom 

 of the rustic world, which are lost and forgotten in those often too 

 dark places of the earth whose inhabitants pride themselves on, as 

 the great cities of light. 



Most conspicuous among medical centres, vaster than their many 

 hospitals, are the medical resorts ; originally mostly for their waters, 

 and often dating from Roman antiquity, like Bath, and three of 

 "Aix" (Aquas) and more; with others more recent, like Vichy and 

 its rivals. High sunny places, like Davos for phthisis, or Leysin for 

 heliotherapy, are again but examples of a numerous class; while 

 even those fundamentally of psychic appeal — which also date from 

 antiquity, though Lourdes has renewed, if not surpassed them — 

 seem also undeniably to have their striking cases of success, as 

 indeed is not unreasonably to be expected. In America too the 

 admirably comprehensive team-work of Battle Creek attracts 

 patients even from Europe for periodic overhaul and repair; and 

 such collective institutes are arising in other countries as well as 

 our own. Particularly suggestive and significant is also the initiative 

 of that eminently wise physician, the late Sir James MacKenzie, 

 as so notably towards the investigation of illness in its earliest 

 stages, of pre-illness indeed, in fact of the very embryology of dis- 

 ease; and so with his Institute at St. Andrews designed with his 

 all-round medical insight, and with exemplary advance in bringing 

 into this the local and regional practitioners, towards scientific 

 co-operation accordingly, and when need be practically as well. 



But these centres and institutions, old and new alike, seem 

 not to have attained to such co-ordinate influence and example 

 as the ancient medical centres of Greece. Thus Epidauros, in 

 Argolis — of which the easily accessible descriptions, from any 



