surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions"
whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient
State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in
the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving
deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children.
The net result is in each case the same--the altered ratio of the total
amount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive
disease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our
worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent,
must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy. And this prospect
becomes more certain, when you reflect that the physician as we know
him is not, like other men and things, a being of gradual growth, of
slow evolution: from Adam to the middle of the last century the world
saw nothing even in the least resembling him. No son of Paian _he_, but
a fatherless, full-grown birth from the incessant matrix of Modern
Time, so motherly of monstrous litters of "Gorgon and Hydra and
Chimaeras dire"; you will understand what I mean when you consider the
quite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics or
antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of
such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this very
time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable
man to laugh at disease--laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its
natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of
destroying its ever-expanding _existence_. Do you know that at this
moment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likeness
suffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all of
whom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in the
hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," like
missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to
mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean