398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the child in some degree affects the parent. Indeed, the suffering 

 of a parent over the misfortunes of the child is often greater than 

 that of the child itself. It is important that man should under- 

 stand the great power that inheritance exerts upon the race for 

 good and for evil, so that he may make a wise departure in the 

 right direction ; and that he should know that his daily life so 

 regulates his habits of mind and body that each succeeding day 

 is the sum total of the days that have gone before in its influence 

 upon his future health and movements. 



Confucius says : " When you know a thing, to hold that you 

 know it ; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you 

 do not know it — this is knowledge/* The laity are of necessity 

 more or less ignorant of the nature of disease. And it would 

 seem that their ignorance is shared by no inconsiderable number 

 of our profession. Every malady pursues a definite course, and 

 ends in restoration, incomplete recovery, or in death. Now, I be- 

 lieve that those medical men who are familiar with the natural 

 history of disease will admit that the milder forms of most acute 

 affections will pass through their various stages and end in recov- 

 ery without the assistance of a single drug. Moreover, I think 

 they will be obliged to acknowledge that, under the most favora- 

 ble circumstances and most skilled treatment, many persons die 

 overpowered by the virulence of a malady. The daily record of 

 vital statistics would seem to prove as much. And the patholo- 

 gists will bear testimony to the fact that where disease, either 

 acute or chronic, has invaded a vital organ, just so much of the 

 tissue as is destroyed remains destroyed and is never reproduced. 

 Have we a broken-down lung ? The best that can happen is 

 that the process shall be stopped. Are portions of the kidneys 

 degenerated ? We can but save the remainder. Has the liver 

 begun to retrograde into fibrous tissue ? We can at best but check 

 the retrogression. 



The probable reason that treatment does not keep pace with 

 the rapid advance of pathology is that therapeutics has gone 

 astray, since the only possible solution for some of these diffi- 

 culties is to seek out the cause and obviate it. A great deal of 

 time and talent have been wasted in a fruitless search for specific 

 remedies for disease, like unto the metaphysicians who have been 

 asking unanswerable questions for hundreds of years about the 

 unknowable. 



While it is possible to imagine a community so intelligent as 

 to exist free from the ravages of disease, it is too much for the 

 most sanguine to hope for in the near future. But, notwithstand- 

 ing this, the history of the recent past assures us that already 

 great strides are being made in the proper direction. Devastat- 

 ing epidemics are less common, because stupidity and superstition 



