Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/90

80 gradually, or set in with greater or less intensity. A quantity of arsenic which ordinarily would kill at once, is borne by the habitual arsenic-eater. Of two similarly constituted persons, cholera will take one away at once, while another will escape with a light attack. A disease is also incurable when its causes work on without interruption. Malaria induces an incurably chronic condition if the infected person does not leave the impregnated marsh-land of his residence. A bronchial catarrh continues stationary, and at last draws the lungs into sympathy with it, if the person attacked by it remains constantly exposed to a dusty atmosphere. "With like suddenness and energy of the causes of disease, with like continuance of the local processes, the individual's power of resistance, the vigor of his constitution are important factors in determining the outcome. A vigorous thirty-year-old man will overcome an inflammation of the lungs which would be fatal to an old man, to a drinker, or to a man weakened by luxury or a life of dissipation or suffering. Finally, crimen non est artis, sed ægroti—the fault is not of the art, but of the patient—is the phrase that may be applied to those cases in which the most correct measures taken under favorable circumstances fail to accomplish their purpose, because the patient himself does not or can not co-operate with them. No treatment can relieve the smoker from his throat-catarrh, so long as he persists in his habit. This aspect of the case is especially pertinent to the nervous disorders which are one of the growing scourges of our age; incapacity and vacillation, the force of outer influences, or the pressure of business too often intervene to interrupt a cure which was otherwise fairly possible.

Gloomy as are the prospects which we have before us here, we still recognize that all diseases which do not fall under one of these mentioned categories are curable, or that their curability is only a question of time. Strange as it may sound in the present state of medicine, we believe that the possibility of in time curing malignant tumors is not yet closed.

Real healing, the restoration to their normal state of functions and tissues that have been changed by disease, is brought about in its essentials only through the life-processes in the organism. Therefore the answer to the question to what degree the healing art is or may be in a condition to influence these processes will be decisive as to whether it shall enlarge the boundaries of its knowledge. And if it results that this can not be, or can be only within a small compass, then will arise the further question whether the object shall be hopelessly given up, or whether still other possibilities are open for medicine to strive after its high aim. It will never be possible to re-form lost cells or to cause separated ones to grow together again; never immediately to