Page:Old ninety-nine's cave.djvu/315

 "Then he did not believe himself cured?" Eletheer said.

"Have you yet taken up the study of the nervous system?" Dr. Herschel asked, as though what had happened were an every-*day occurrence.

"No, that comes in our second year."

"One year on the nervous system! Ten years, a lifetime; and we are still in an unexplored realm.

"I wish particularly to point a moral in 'Old Ninety-Nine's' case, as the symptoms there manifested will be among the most difficult to treat, particularly in the uneducated. First, because the word leprosy is crystalized in the human mind into an incurable disease and having once had it, a patient, unless of unusual intellect, lives in constant dread of its return—our hospitals for the insane would grow beautifully less by the elimination of that one element fear. Leprosy is a germ disease; the leper bacillus was discovered in 1874. Thus heredity is disproven. We know it to be a parasitic disease."