Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/28

24 mortem room, it is leaving its terra firma, of morbid anatomy (I say it with lingering regret) mapped out so well by the great masters of the past, by Baillie, Bright, Addison, Peacock, Bristowe, Jenner, Wilks, Payne, and many another still happily with us, and to be betaking itself to aviation, a deadly dangerous, albeit, as it must be, an earnest pursuit. Let us remember lest we forget.

And of the many pathological phenomena that I think emphasize this still more, and which I would fain call unequivocally functional, in their origin at any rate, I must yet mention one or two. It used to be said that acute disease is mostly an outburst from a chronic one. This is but very imperfectly true. It is true that many an acute attack of disease is supposed to be de novo, when, as a fact, further investigation proves that it has followed upon pre-existing changes. But then these, in their turn, have come about in so insidious a manner that they have never been capable of recognition as disease at all; and I am here to-day to contend that the future of pathology will be a physiological one, the study of erratic function that has confirmed itself into an habitually baneful one. And I see no reason for limiting the pathology thus engendered to function only. It is surely permissible to hold that morbid function may bring about structural change. There is not an organ of the body of which this is not true, but how largely and obviously so when applied to the brain. A large part of the structural disease of the brain is led up to by slow and insidious misapplications of thought and action that ultimately declare themselves as pronounced disease,