PHYSICAL DETERIORATION. 45 



upon the race. We moderns as individuals have 

 many advantages over those who have gone before 

 us ; we owe to the untiring energy of our ancestors 

 the facilities for travel, the pleasures of accumulated 

 music and literature, etc., but among these hundreds 

 of advantages we possess none are more marked than 

 those we owe to the scientific followers of the pro- 

 fession of medicine, the application of whose learn- 

 ing gives in our day to the less robust a possibility of 

 life and happiness they never had before. 



Preventive Medicine. 



The words " mederi," to heal, " medicus," the 

 healer, and " medicina," the remedy, indicate pretty 

 clearly the almost superstitious feeling current in 

 early times regarding the attributes of the medical 

 man ; but physicians have in more recent years 

 begun to doubt in some measure of their power to 

 cure disease when once established. With increased 

 knowledge, and with growth of professional acumen, 

 the limits of this power are more clearly seen, and the 

 solution of a metallic salt, or decoction of a herb is 

 now withheld when at one time it would have been 

 administered with the fullest confidence. With this 

 healthy scepticism as to their power to cure has come 

 very certain and exact knowledge of how to prevent, 

 and preventive medicine has recently exercised an 



