Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/524

520 no need of hurrying to put discoveries to use. Many are discredited because of such ill-advised attempts and the investigator himself becomes discouraged in the futile effort to apply principles which fit only in part the practical condition to be influenced.

The tendency to make research directly prove pet theories, find short cuts to health, and cure diseases hitherto unsuccessfully treated will continue to give the investigator trouble for some time to come. What is needed is that at least a small number of scientists work at these problems of disease as we would at the other phenomena of the world around us. They should look them over from all sides calmly and objectively to get at the lessons expressed in them. They should look upon pathological manifestations as the normal sequences of causes operating under special conditions and for certain periods of time. They should endeavor to analyze phenomena rather than attempt to suppress or crush them. That function should belong to the health officer and the practising physician.

In order to take this calm attitude toward disease as a natural phenomenon and attempt to explain it, it may be necessary to move backward toward simpler problems from man to the higher animals, from these to lower types, from the complex processes of the human machine to the physical and chemical phenomena of the inorganic world. This has not always been the attitude of medicine, for standing as it does under the too near and impending shadow of suffering and death, it was but natural to attack the most difficult and complex problems first.

It is needless to say that the position of the research worker of the immediate future will not be an easy one. The strain to produce something is far more wearing than teaching. The mental play of the teacher's mind to produce something is relaxation compared with that of the investigator to carry out a contract for the delivery of new knowledge. The gap of years and even generations may yawn between the problem in hand and actual solution. It may indeed prove to be wholly impregnable from the point of attack. It may be solved by some obscure genius with slight facilities who happens to hit the combination which unlocks the secret.

We have all experienced the burden and complexity of growing information which has not reached the stage of actual knowledge. Extensive tables of figures are laboriously built up around it and the worker himself becomes encrusted and almost asphyxiated with methods and technicalities. We find the laboratory growing hot and stifling as we painfully add one more fact to the heavy burden. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly the true discoverer comes with a simple explanation. At his approach the air is cleared and freshened. Tables and figures are shoved to one side, and we begin our work once more with improved vision along another road.