330 ADDKESS DELIVERED TO THE 



they would be saved if left to the guidance of their own 

 instincts. As disease, then, is the result of a divergence from 

 the conditions of health ; as man is privileged, in virtue of 

 his conscious intelligence, to provide for himself the condi- 

 tions of health over the extended area of the globe, and 

 under a never-ceasing variation of circumstances ; but as he 

 is at the same time liable, from the nature of his conscious 

 intelligence, to diverge from those principles of truth which 

 guide to the knowledge of the conditions of health, and to 

 neglect that sense of duty which indicates the proper applica- 

 tion of that knowledge when acquired, he becomes subjected 

 to the necessary evil consequences. These consequences I 

 need not enlarge upon. They involve all the disease and 

 suffering which result from the neglect or infringement of 

 duty to ourselves and to our fellow-men. They stand related 

 to all the questions of personal and social ethics, and all the 

 demands of public hygiene. Finally, they constitute the 

 grounds of another general principle in the philosophy of 

 medicine, which is, that the greater liability of man to disease 

 is intimately related to his higher conscious intelligence. 



How essential, then, gentlemen, must it be in your pro- 

 fession that you should possess a clear and comprehensive 

 conception of all the arrangements by which human life is 

 conditioned and modified ! How vague and limited are our 

 conceptions of these arrangements apt to be ! We are apt to 

 look for them in the dissecting-room and pathological theatre, 

 and to forget that their most influential elements are beyond 

 the reach of the knife, or the penetration of the microscope. 

 Even when compelled to take into consideration the relations 

 of the conscious intelligence to the bodily frame, we are apt 

 to consider it as an intrusion into a department of inquiry 

 which may adjoin, but which forms no part of our own. I 

 venture to insist upon this topic, because by some it may be 

 considered as entirely foreign to medical interest ; and by 



