Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/450

 To go on with a bare enumeration of the organic defects handed down from parent to child would occupy many pages. Enough has been said to convey some idea of the magnitude of the evil. There is no cause of grief, of misery and suffering that will hear comparison with it. Even that of war is a mercy compared with the torments of disease. The seventy thousand annually slain by one disease, consumption, involves an amount of suffering which no battle-field can equal. In the latter death is usually sudden, and therefore almost painless, while death by consumption implies months of torture by the destruction of lung tissue inch by inch.

In an age distinguished for progress and philanthropy, that such a gigantic evil has received scarcely any attention is worthy of remark. In large part is this doubtless due to the prevailing opinion that the development of inherited tendencies to disease is unavoidable—a visitation upon children for the sins of the fathers, not to be averted. Even among medical men is there a prevailing skepticism as to the renovation of defective blood. Yet it will be admitted by the candid among them that this doubt is not grounded on a careful study of the subject, but on some desultory observations, and on some remarks to be met with here and there in medical literature. In palliation this may be said, that as a rule physicians are far more intent in discovering the best means of curing than of averting disease, well knowing that the latter is a thankless and little honored pursuit, while the former brings large returns of gratitude and reward.

If in our forty millions of people some twenty-six million inherit some constitutional defect, the question is of deep and wide interest whether such imperfection can be erased, and, if so, by what means. The interests involved are: a nearer extension of life to its normal limits, greater freedom from disease and deformity; a diminution in the necessity for ever-growing asylums for the helplessly imperfect and diseased; an increase of the ratio of able-bodied men for the defense of the state in time of need; a lessened necessity for the consumption of drugs and the support of forty thousand physicians; and an increase and perpetuation of the blood which has been our chief glory as a nation.

The nearer the approach to physical perfection, the less likely will be the occurrence of derangement and disease from slight causes, such as atmospheric vicissitudes, and the greater the chances that the termination of life will be natural, or from the harmonious, progressive, and painless decay of the body as a whole. Death by disease through one organ is abnormal, violent, and torturing; there should be no weak points in the citadel of life. Men with excellent physical organizations do not need to be ever on the watch for the preservation of their health. They possess that buoyancy of life which carries them safely over all the minor influences inimical to healthy action. All that is required of them for the preservation of such a vital excellence is, that