770 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 936 



men. It is cheaper to stop killing. In our 

 own country, in the time of peace, when 

 nothing but peace is possible among civil- 

 ized nations we spend nearly a million dol- 

 lars a day on matters concerned with past 

 or future wars ; $850,000 a day, on future 

 wars alone, that we may not be caught nap- 

 ping when the day of the impossible shall 

 arrive. 



A wiser and more civilized nation would 

 give some part of this sum to the preven- 

 tion or stamping out of the worst of infec- 

 tious diseases. For if we are napping 

 these are sure to come. The danger of the 

 red plague, present everywhere, is infinitely 

 greater than that of war with any part of 

 Europe or of Asia. The terrible infliction 

 of the unknown parasite which shows itself 

 as infantile paralysis awaits the strong arm 

 of the people to set it aside entirely. No 

 infectious disease would long exist if we 

 made adequate quarantine provision. Its 

 germs, animal or plant, must be carried 

 from man to man, or from animal to man, 

 else the race of parasites would die out. 

 Now that we know what our enemies are, 

 it is possible for us to fight them. This I 

 said in a review of Tyndall's work which I 

 printed thirty-five years ago. Now that we 

 know what our enemies are and now that we 

 know that they can be fought successfully 

 only by national and international coopera- 

 tion, it is our duty thus to fight them. It 

 shows a lack of national manliness to con- 

 tinue to bear these ills when a little energy 

 with the knowledge we have is adequate to 

 throw them all off. 



I am still a young man, I am sure of 

 that. As I said once before, when I hear 

 the students speak of Old Jordan, I know 

 that they mean the river of Palestine, or 

 perchance in these days a forbidden brand 

 of alcoholics. They do not mean me. 



It is not so many years since I received 

 the degree of doctor of medicine, and I 



hasten to say that I have never practised 

 medicine and never intended to, so that my 

 failures in knowledge have never harmed 

 any one, nor brought me a dollar of un- 

 earned increment. 



But at that time in 1875, the words bac- 

 terium, bacillus, microbe were all unknown, 

 all slumbering together in the Greek Lex- 

 icon. This lexicon gave no suspicion that 

 ^aKTcplov and Aoyos would come together to 

 form a science, and that the one science 

 most vitally related to human life. The 

 world of science and therefore the province 

 of medicine knew nothing of invisible one- 

 celled animals and plants, bacteria and 

 protozoa, which flourish and run their 

 courses in the life blood of living animals. 

 The source of infection in disease was then 

 called a virus and the growth of a virus 

 was an extension of death. Carlyle had 

 said that a fallen leaf must still have life 

 in it else how could it rot. But neither the 

 poet nor the prophet realized that this life 

 which tore the fallen leaf to pieces was the 

 life of a multifarious group of one-celled 

 vegetation whose function it is to return 

 all organic matter not still active back to 

 the universe in its constituent elements. 

 In those days malaria was an evil spirit or 

 miasma, the product of bad air or may be 

 of bad water. All plagues were of the 

 same sort. No one suspected the mosquito, 

 the fly, the flea, the louse, the bedbug or 

 the woodtick of harboring any vices worse 

 than those which their bite or their pres- 

 ence suggests. 



There was no science of infectious dis- 

 eases and therefore no art in curing or pre- 

 venting them. The most that could be 

 done was to let them run their course, 

 allaying as may be some of their most 

 annoying symptoms. 



Antiseptics were only guesswork. We 

 had not heard of carbolic acid, or barely 



