BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1239 



encyclopedia onwards, need no repetition here — seems alike from 

 its ruins and its traditions to have on the whole surpassed all suc- 

 cessors, and this not only in its magnificence and beauty, but in the 

 comprehensiveness of its aims, uniting medical treatment in principle 

 comprehensive, with psycho-therapy no less widely so. Is it not time 

 therefore for great medical schools, so long strictly confined between 

 their teaching and their hospitals, yet now extending their acti- 

 vities into manifold lines of research, to be also taking a fuller part 

 in the separate healing resorts and institutes around them, and 

 helping to raise these not only to more and more of team-work, 

 as now in progress, but also as far as may be, to the rank of an 

 Epidauros ; why not indeed laying the foundations of such a health- 

 city of their own? In at least two such medical schools, of long- 

 known and still active eminence, Edinburgh and Montpellier, 

 sporadic initiatives towards something of Epidauros are beginning 

 to feel their way; yet not so rapidly but that any others may take 

 the effective lead. Meantime let us be continuing also the far vaster 

 task of cleansing, from their dirt and grime, their deadly and depres- 

 sing smoke-pall, our existing cities; likewise sanitating towns, 

 renewing their villages; for when all these are in order and beauty, 

 our existing hospitals, and even health-resorts, should diminish 

 rather than increase. Yet the great difficulties and delays on the 

 way of all this, as sanitarians and town-planners find daily in their 

 practice, show that the prevalent mechanistic-pecuniary culture on 

 one hand, and the traditional literary culture on the other, which 

 between them have as yet crushed the minds* of all classes within 

 their too limited moulds, remain alike all but inaccessible to the 

 essential ideas of biology, and so even to those of medicine ; as also 

 to those of social science, and its applications, though now becoming 

 civic and regional. Still a new generation is arising, with a larger 

 proportion of minds not thus so fixed, so surely with many opening 

 ones. 



At present perhaps most striking cf aU is the current progress in 

 the treatment of leprosy, which has so long baffled physicians. 

 India, which suffers widely from this, has a very old story, of a 

 maharaja who became a leper, yet was cured by a wise rishi, through 

 his prescription of an oil-containing plant, called Chalmoogra. After 

 modern medicine had so far failed with leprosy, and so could but 

 segregate in Leper Asylums as of old, it occurred to Sir Leonard 

 Rogers — one of the brightest of our often eminent physicians in 

 India, and who has even found a treatment for cholera — to identify 

 this plant, and give it a trial; and behold — with encouraging success, 

 now aided also by the biochemists, who are extracting and com- 

 bining its active principles. It thus seems that one of the oldest 

 and most abhorrent of diseases is nearing its practical elimination. 



The terrible sleeping sickness of Central Africa seems similarly 



