78 PHYSIOLOGY AND NATIONAL NEEDS 



ask the questions, " What is wrong ? " " Why is it 

 wrong ? " Unless he does so the treatment must be 

 merely empirical. Such and such a drug has been 

 recommended by such and such an authority, 

 therefore it is used without any consideration of 

 how it acts in the body or how it can modify the 

 patient's condition. 



This way of looking at disease breeds an un- 

 critical spirit which tends to credulity, to seeing 

 things not as they are but as they are expected to 

 be, and to a blind acceptance of imperfectly tested 

 lines of treatment based on superficial and in- 

 accurate observations. Witness the authoritative 

 statements by Dr. This or That on the treatment 

 of influenza or on the action of alcohol ! 



Few people seem to recognise how much medicine 

 even at the present time is based upon mere 

 empiricism. 



Every one who knows about it knows how 

 impotent medical treatment is to cure disease when 

 once established, when once structural changes 

 have occurred. 



The slight divergencies from the normal, the 

 slight upsets of physiological action, which are the 

 first stage in the development of real disease are 

 too often ignored. Only when the process has so 

 advanced that organic changes, with the definite train 

 of symptoms which follow them, have appeared 

 is the condition dignified by the name of a disease, 



