Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/30

26 Another instance may well be fatigue, for it nowadays is a disease. What more common than to meet woman or man who is “so tired, always tired.”

We all know the machine that will not spark aright—every movement an effort, even rest a pain. You know too well that there is nothing to be called structural change, and that even rest furnishes you with no remedy. It is clear that what is required is a fresh stock of some form of energy for charging up the machine that we are as yet not able to supply. So far away, and yet perhaps so nigh. These are they who are born out of due time; the day of their like has yet to come. And with fatigue might well be coupled pain, for there are those who almost seem to be born in pain, and of a sort that no remedy seems able to assuage. Says the poet:

but that is extra medicinam. Even more than death pain is our hereditary foe—no quarter given. In olden days hysteria stalked abroad, but to-day a broader view of physiology would teach that pain is no certain indication of any existing morbid anatomy; that its intensity is always subjective, individual, aloof from standardization; and it is evident that in such chronic pain one needs to recreate the nervous elements, or to instil them with some electroid that shall reset the spring of the machinery in motion, and guide it smoothly on its livelong bent. Nor, though it has been the quest of æons, does this seem to be inexorably beyond the knowledge of the future.

Of other groups of disease that might be men-