Preventable Diseases

Author of Studies in Human and Comparative Pathology, Instinct and Health, etc., etc. Clinical Professor of Medicine, New York Polyclinic, late Lecturer in Comparative Pathology, London Medical Graduates College and University of Buffalo
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908 AND 1909, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY WOODS HUTCHINSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November 1909 FIFTH IMPRESSION

The human body as a mechanism is far from perfect. It can be beaten or surpassed at almost every point by some product of the machine-shop or some animal. It does almost nothing perfectly or with absolute precision. As Huxley most unexpectedly remarked a score of years ago, If a manufacturer of optical instruments were to hand us for laboratory use an instrument so full of defects and imperfections as the human eye, we should promptly decline to accept it and return it to him. But, as he went on to say, while the eye is inaccurate as a microscope, imperfect as a telescope, crude as a photographic camera, it is all of these in one. In other words, like the body, while it does nothing accurately and perfectly, it does a dozen different things well enough for practical purposes. It has the crowning merit, which overbalances all these minor defects, of being able to adapt itself to almost every conceivable change of circumstances.
This is the keynote of the surviving power of the human species. It is not enough that the body should be prepared to do good work under ordinary conditions, but it must be capable, if needs be, of meeting extraordinary ones. It is not enough for the body to be able to take care of itself, and preserve a fair degree of efficiency in health, under what might be termed favorable or average circumstances, but it must also be prepared to protect itself and regain its balance in disease.
The human automobile in its million-year endurance-run has had to learn to become self-repairing; and well has it learned its lesson. Not only, in the language of the old saw, is there a remedy for every evil under the sun, but in at least eight cases out of ten that remedy will be found within the body itself. Generations ago this self-balancing, self-repairing power was recognized by the more thoughtful fathers in medicine and even dignified by a name in their pompous Latinity—the vis medicatrix naturæ , the healing power of nature.