It is impossible for a specialist, actively engaged in the pursuit of his own task, to understand the human being as a whole.
The vast cellular associations called viscera are placed, as we know, under the command of a single nervous center. This center sends its silent orders to every region of the organic world. In this way, heart, blood vessels, lungs, digestive apparatus, and endocrine glands become a functional whole in which all organic individualities blend.
In short the body is an anatomical heterogeneity and a physiological homogeneity. It acts as if it were simple. But it shows us a complex structure. Such an antithesis is created by our mind. We always delight in picturing man as being constructed like one of our machines.
Disease consists of a functional and structural disorder. No disturbance remains strictly confined to a single organ. Only those who know man both in his parts and in his entirety, simultaneously under his anatomical, physiological, and mental aspects, are capable of understanding him when he is sick.
Infectious, or microbian, diseases, are caused by viruses or bacteria. They produce infantile paralysis, grippe, encephalitis lethargica, and perhaps cancer.
The years of life which we have gained by the suppression of diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid fever, etc., are paid for by the long sufferings, and the lingering deaths caused by chronic affections, and especially by cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. In addition, man is liable, as he was in former times, to chronic nephritis, brain tumors, arterial sclerosis, syphilis, cerebral haemorrhages, hypertension, and also to the intellectual, moral, and physiological decay determined by these maladies. Although modern hygiene has made human existence far safer, longer, and more pleasant, diseases have not been mastered. They have simply changed in nature.
Inward Time.
A man of forty-five has no more chance of dying at the age of eighty years now than in the last century.
This failure of hygiene and medicine is a strange fact. Inspite of the progress achieved in the heating, ventilation and lighting of houses, of dietary hygiene, bathrooms, and sports, of periodical medical examinations, and increasing numbers of medical specialists, not even one day has been added to the span of human life.
We have already mentioned that physiological time is a flux of irreversible changes of the tissues and humors.
The leucocytes multiply, secrete new substances. They form abscesses in the infected regions, and the ferments contained in the pus of the abscesses digest the microbes. These ferments also possess the power of dissolving living tissues. They thus open a way for the abscess, either toward the skin or some hollow organ. In this manner, pus is eliminated from the body. The symptoms of bacterial diseases express the effort made by tissues and humors to adapt themselves to the new conditions, to resist them, and to return to a normal state.
The Remaking of Man.
Medicine cannot give to man the kind of health he needs without taking into consideration his true nature. We have learned that organs, humors, and mind are one, that they are the result of hereditary tendencies, of the conditions of development, of the chemical, physical, physiological and mental factors of the environment. We must help this whole perform its functions efficiently rather than intervene ourselves in the work of each organ. Some individuals are immune to infections and degenerative disease, and to the decay of senescence. We have to learn their secret. It is the knowledge of the inner mechanisms responsible for such endurance that we must acquire.
The marvelous success of hygiene in the fight against infectious diseases and great epidemics allows biological research to turn its attention partly from bacteria and viruses to physiological and mental processes.
Conclusions.
It is evident that the trend of medicine today is toward the teachings of Samuel Hahnemann, which demonstrates conclusively that all therapy must follow the law of similia. The human body is a unit, and cannot be divided into single parts for therapy. This, also, has been demonstrated by J.E.R. Mac Donagh in the book entitled The Universe Through Medicine.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.
Seattle.
Chairman, Bureau of Surgery