NEW OUTLOOKS IN MEDICINE. 363 



But after a time, when the conditions under which the cells 

 live and work are definitely unfavorable, they may fail to main- 

 tain the standard. Their performances become faulty or feeble, 

 or, with their structure, may largely change. If carried be- 

 yond a certain limit, these weakened or perverted functions and 

 their attendant physical changes constitute the condition called 

 disease. 



In fact, science does not now permit us to forget that " the liv- 

 ing body is a mechanism, the proper working of which we term 

 health ; its disturbance, disease ; its stoppage, death." The happy 

 condition known as health does not commonly draw attention to 

 itself, and so has escaped personification ; while the other condi- 

 tions disease and death, strictly its analogues from the earliest 

 times have been invested with such mysteries as among all people 

 have led to misconception and to figurative speech. 



I wish especially to emphasize the simplicity of the modern 

 scientific conception of disease as a disturbed condition of a com- 

 plex cellular mechanism, because it is largely due to a failure to 

 comprehend this that the shadows of the middle ages actually 

 still lie dark over certain of the popular conceptions of medicine, 

 and seriously retard the speedy fruition of many of its new dis- 

 coveries. 



The practical ends which have been of necessity held in view 

 by the devotees to medicine, the bald empiricism through which 

 most of the therapeutic resources of our art were won, and the 

 stubborn persistence of old and misty conceptions of disease have 

 greatly hindered the realization of the fact that medicine is, after 

 all, only one phase of the great science of life which we call biol- 

 ogy, and that its varied themes must be pursued by the same 

 methods and under the same strict safeguards against error in 

 observation and in inference as are current among those who 

 study science in its simpler aspects. It may make some practical 

 difference that the particular animal to which the medical man 

 devotes his time is highly complex, fosters a soul, has a future, 

 and pays in cash (sometimes) the expert who can relieve it from 

 discomfort or pain and prolong for a little now and then the cel- 

 lular confederation. But if we do not constantly draw light from 

 the common sources, we shall wander hopelessly in empiricism 

 and fail at last. In truth, to strive for wide comprehension of the 

 human frame without the constant aid of sister sciences and fre- 

 quent reference to simpler forms and functions is but to build 

 upon the surfaces. 



Permit me now in a somewhat desultory fashion to glance 

 with you at two or three phases of recent development in medi- 

 cine. I have not wished to frame an exhaustive inventory of our 

 gains, but rather to note such features as can be led to wider be- 



