THE NEW PHYSIOLOGY. 79 



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will not confuse heat-stroke with fever, or make the 

 mistake of attributing fever to mere increased heat- 

 production in the body. He who knows how the breath- 

 ing is normally regulated will be in a position to distin- 

 guish at once between various causes of abnormal 

 breathing ; and similarly for every abnormal symptom 

 met with in disease. But the mechanistic physiology 

 gives a minimum of information about the maintenance 

 of the normal. One looks in vain in physiological text- 

 books for connected accounts of the regulation of breath- 

 ing, circulation, kidney activity, general metabolism, 

 nervous activity. The main facts of physiology are 

 partly ignored, and partly strewn about in hopeless dis- 

 connection and confusion. A student of medicine may 

 learn some true physiology at the bedside, or he may 

 never learn it at all, and become either a hopeless empiric 

 or what I do not hesitate to call a mechanistic pedant. 



Medicine needs a new physiology which will teach 

 what health really means, and how it maintains itself 

 under the ordinarily varying conditions of environment. 

 We also need a pathology which will teach how health 

 tends to reassert itself under totally abnormal conditions, 

 and a pharmacology which will teach us, not merely the 

 ' actions " of drugs, but how drugs can be used rationally 

 to aid the body in the maintenance and re-establishment 

 of health. The new physiology, new pathology, and new 

 pharmacology are growing up around us just now. I can 

 see them more particularly in the splendid advances which 

 the medical and other biological sciences are making in 

 America. You have the advantage of having less of old 

 intellectual machinery to scrap than we have in the old 

 countries ; but perhaps we shall not be much behindhand. 



