194 Medicine : 



neurasthenia, regardless quite of what meaning, if 

 any, the word has. 



Looking out on the present state and prospect 

 of medicine, it is obvious that its future work will 

 be mainly to prevent and stop the beginnings of 

 disease — to take good order that it shall not come 

 — and if it do come to prevent functional disorder 

 from lapsing into fixed disease, which must be 

 given over either to the surgeon's knife or to the 

 shears of Atropos ; for to despise the little things 

 of functional disorder is to fall by little and little 

 into organic disease. Now, preventive medicine 

 has two plain ends, the one of which is being pur- 

 sued with signal success, the other not duly studied; 

 the first, by all fit measures and precautions to 

 defend it from those attacks that come from 

 without, whether in gross form or as invisible 

 microbes floating to and fro on earth to assault 

 and hurt it ; the second, to obviate the predispo- 

 sitions to disease which lie within the body, by 

 giving it inward strength to resist its subtile, ever- 

 present, ever-active enemies — in fact, to teach it 

 to die at last of old age, as every doctor ought 

 theoretically himself to do. 



The success of preventive war against disease 

 is manifest in the decrease of such diseases as 

 plague, typhus and typhoid fevers, small-pox, 

 malaria, hydrophobia. Here medical art, having 

 learnt definitely what it has to fight against, em- 

 ploys definite measures of defence and attack for 

 a definite end. So it has relinquished the fearful 



