XXXIX 
THE OPTIMISM OF PATHOLOGY 
NLY the foolish or the ignorant can speak 
light-heartedly of disease with its malignant 
subtlety and spreading trail of misery. How often 
the microbe blots out the sun; how often we are 
staggered by the corruptio optimi pessima seen in 
the dissolution of a structure that stood for a 
generation like a tower four-square to the winds; 
how often, in spite of the triumphs of modern 
medicine, the hydra-headed irrepressibility of disease 
grips us like a nightmare! Health is a magnificent 
quality, but it is ever cheek by jowl with disease; 
and thus arises the sinister view, of which William 
James spoke, that ‘beauty and hideousness, love 
and cruelty, life and death keep house together 
in indissoluble partnership.” But without talking 
nonsense about the whiteness of blackness, or the 
goodness of evil, it is perhaps possible to bring 
forward some useful considerations in regard to the 
optimism of pathology. In the first place, there 
is the important fact that apart from senescence 
and parasites large and small, there is almost no 
disease in wild Nature. Should a pathological 
variation arise, it is eliminated before it takes grip. 
Constitutional disease is the occurrence of a meta- 
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