Page:Restorative medicine - an Harveian annual oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on June 21, 1871 (the 210th anniversary) (IA restorativemedic00cham).pdf/20

6 RESTORATIVE MEDICINE. All except mere reactionary speculators have, till lately, followed the advances here implied. Ex- amine each, and you will see that they are all agreed in one feeling as to the nature of disease, namely, that there is therein added to the animal frame something which needs to be reduced, or opposed, or assisted, or neutralized, or concen- trated. Now it seems to me that the tendency of the medicine of to-day is to take an essentially opposite view. Daily stronger and stronger an impression is being borne in upon the practitioner's mind, as expressed in his acts, that discase is some- thing less, not something more, than life. Under the light of advancing physiology, morbid sub- stances and processes appear examples of arrested development, each one the more as the more inti- mate is our acquaintance with it. The end and aim of happy treatment is, therefore, essentially an addition, an endeavor to retain, to restore, to develop into fuller life those identical morbid sub- stances and processes which have hitherto been uniformly condemned to expulsion. When we are sick,

"Tis life of which our limbs are scant, 'Tis life, more life, for which we pant, More life, and fuller, that we want,"