This gentleman attended a patient some years ago in an attack of confluent small-pox under these remarkable circumstances: This patient had always exhibited a morbid horror of the disease, refusing to hear anything about it or to allow it to be referred to in his presence. A friend on one occasion brought a very fine collection of anatomical plates to show him, sent over from France. Amongst them was a representation of confluent small-pox in a woman. No sooner had this gentleman beheld it than he cried, ‘Take it away! I cannot look at it; it makes me ill!’ The next day his son sent for the doctor to see his father, who had felt unwell ever since the shock of seeing the pathological plate. He was found suffering from the first symptoms of an illness which proved to be an attack of confluent small-pox. The most searching inquiry failed to discover any traces of the disease, either in the neighbourhood or in any connection whatever with the patient. The cause of this illness, one of the most severe cases the doctor had ever met with, remained a mystery.
It has become of vital importance to investigate ‘how far the mental attitude determines or permits the onset of infectious disease.’
CHAPTER XI
The Range of Painless Research
‘I am content to let Nature do all the torturing and man all the relieving ... the grandest physiology and physiological discovery could exist outside every shade of painful experiment.’[20]
These are the words of one of our wisest physicians, deliberately written in the full maturity of a life devoted to original research and its practical application to medicine. His experience led him to the recognition of this great truth: that the supreme aim of the medical profession must become more and more the advancement of sanitation. In any comprehensive view of medical art as a science the cure of disease is rationally secondary to its prevention.
This, notwithstanding the trade exigencies of competitive living, is recognised by the established rule of the profession—that the physician’s first duty is not to injure his patient.
Sanitation necessarily takes into consideration all the elements, both mental and physical, of our complex nature.
It is by the investigation of the laws of healthy created life and their practical application that progress in medicine must be looked for. By observing ‘scientifically’ the method and variations of these laws we shall approach nearer to the understanding of ‘vital force.’
An immense range of biological inquiry urgently invites the genius of those who are gifted with the rare power of original research.
This range is practically unlimited. The collection of all useful or suggestive facts gathered by genuinely scientific methods from the enormous accumulations to be found in our Government reports, in the records of our medical periodic literature, in the observations of hospitals, societies, cliniques, and private practice, would, if properly arranged and tabulated, form a most useful branch of such a centre. If such collection and examination were extended to the records of other countries, the value as well as labour of the work would be greatly increased.