UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
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 BORDERLAND STUDIES. 
 
 GOULD.
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D. 
 
 The Illustrated Dictionary of Medicine, Biology, and 
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 application. 
 
 P. BLAKISTON, SON & CO., Publishers,. Philadelphia.
 
 BORDERLAND STUDIES 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES AND ESSAYS PERTAINING TO 
 
 MEDICINE AND THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, AND THEIR 
 
 RELATIONS TO GENERAL SCIENCE AND THOUGHT 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE M. GOULD, A.M., M.D. 
 \^^ 
 
 FORMERLY EDITOR OP "THE MEDICAL NEWS." 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 P. BLAKISTON, SON & CO. 
 
 1012 WALNUT STREET 
 1896
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D. 
 
 acs or WM. r. FILL ft oo.. 
 
 1110-14 9ANSOM ST.. 
 PHILADELPHIA.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Continued inquiries for many of the Essays contained 
 
 in this volume, at present out of print, have seemed to 
 
 ^ justify their republication. To these I have added five not 
 
 o hitherto published, and a number of editorial articles from 
 (*) 
 
 the Medical Neivs, similar in character or object to that of 
 
 v the general collection. For courteous permission to re- 
 H 
 ^f publish I am under obligations to the proprietors of The 
 
 Forum, The Medical News, The Monist, The Open Court, and 
 4- to the Council of the American Academy of Medicine. 
 
 + GEORGE M. GOULD. 
 
 S- 
 
 ' - Philadelphia, April, 1896.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. Vivisection, 9 
 
 2. Concerning Medical Language, 40 
 
 3. The Role of the Maternal Instinct in Organic Evolution 59 
 
 4. Life and Its Physical Basis, .... 94 
 
 5. Is Medicine a Science? 131 
 
 6. The Duty of the Community to Medical Science, 144 
 
 7. Charity- Organization and Medicine, 158 
 
 8. Hospitalism 175 
 
 9. The Etiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Prevalent Epidemic 
 
 of Quackery, 197 
 
 10. The Untrustworthiness of the Lay-Press in Medical Matters, . . . 222 
 
 11. The Disorganization of Medical Science, 226 
 
 12. Concerning Specialism, 230 
 
 13. Medicine and City-Noises, 237 
 
 14. Medical Aspects of Life Insurance, 243 
 
 15. Foot-Ball 248 
 
 1 6. Muscular Development and Use the Conditions of Health, .... 255 
 
 17. Everybody's Medical Duty, 258 
 
 18. The Power of Will in Disease 277 
 
 19. The Apotheosis of Hysteria and Whimsicality, 280 
 
 20. Character, 287 
 
 21. The Modern Frankenstein 292 
 
 22. Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness, 319 
 
 23. Human Life Under Denied Sensation, 351 
 
 24. Immortality 356 
 
 Vll
 
 "VIVISECTION."* 
 
 Recently one of the best scientific men in America 
 said to me, " I would make thousands of animals suffer the 
 most atrocious torments for a thousand years if thereby a 
 human being could be spared one pain." This was said 
 by one who is a physician, one not himself a vivisector, 
 and one who is a particularly moral and gentle-mannered 
 man. There was, however, a certain peculiar emphasis 
 and even passionateness in his manner when he said this, 
 that betrayed the subconscious feeling that he was exag- 
 gerating. It seemed to me a noteworthy and significant 
 utterance. 
 
 To this testimony I will add the words of another scient- 
 ist, also a physician, and also not himself a vivisector : 
 
 In answer to objections against vivisection in public 
 schools this gentleman wrote : " I certainly think that child- 
 ren and every one ought to be familiarized with the sight 
 of blood, the pangs of disease, and the solemn event of 
 dying. Death and pain should not be concealed ; they are 
 the greatest of educators, for they teach us the value of 
 life in its highest measure." (The logical conclusion there- 
 fore would seem to be that the more death and pain the 
 better.) These words were written, not spoken in the haste 
 of discussion, and were in response to a request for candid, 
 well-considered scientific judgment, to be published for the 
 world's pondering. To these two many others might be 
 added, but it is unnecessary. 
 
 * Delivered at the Meeting of the American Academy of Medicine, at 
 Atlanta, May 2, 1896. 
 
 2 9
 
 lu " VIVISECTION." 
 
 Now I do not, for the moment, aim at any criticism of 
 these statements, nor of the essential truth or error I may 
 think is contained in them. I adduce them and all the 
 practices of " vivisection " only as a thesis to be fixed in the 
 mind, and over against which we may now place the anti- 
 thesis. Without especial quotation, this antithesis consists 
 of \\\zfact of large and powerful societies, counting in their 
 membership hundreds of the great names of intellectual 
 and social life, societies devoted to the total abolition or 
 prohibition of " vivisection." In the antithesis must also 
 be included the fact of laws enacted and proposed for the 
 prohibition, limitation, or governmental control of all 
 scientific experimentation upon animals. 
 
 And now let us keep firmly before the attention the un- 
 criticised, unmodified facts, the thesis of the justification 
 and the practice of unlimited vivisection, on the part of 
 most scientific men, and, on the part of antivivisection 
 societies the antithesis of zealous and organized opposition, 
 more or less successful, to any and all vivisection. 
 
 Is it not plain that there must be extremism and exag- 
 geration somewhere ? I think wise men -have long ago 
 come to the sensible conclusion that truth does not dwell 
 with extremes. Partizanship is not conducive either to 
 learning the absolute truth or to a convenient modus 
 vivendi. In medio tutissimus ibis is a pretty good old road 
 for comfort, either in intellectual or in any other traveling. 
 
 In this connection it readily occurs to you that a tertium 
 quid has been omitted from our resume of the situation, 
 and that a large proportion of science-loving minds would 
 not assent to the thesis involved in the statements quoted 
 whilst an equally high proportion of intelligent laymen 
 would not join the ranks of the total prohibitionists. And 
 this is true, but not so true as might be supposed. Mug- 
 wumpery is sadly lacking in this controversy. 
 
 I confess, after a somewhat extensive review of the liter-
 
 "VIVISECTION." II 
 
 ature, to a feeling of pitying disgust of both parties in this 
 controversy, and viewing the wild and almost insane hys- 
 terics or dogmatic bitterness of both controversialists, one 
 quite despairs, and almost wishes that a sort of Kilkenny- 
 cat battle might leave peace by extermination. 
 
 There seems to be a sorry tendency for good people to 
 rush to arms hotly for, or dead against, the other party, 
 and to lose that same self-control and judicially of dispo- 
 sition which saves us from woful error in all other affairs of 
 life. Sensible people smile at the unsaintly simplicity of 
 one who thinks that all political goodness is covered by one 
 of the meaningless names, democracy or republicanism, 
 whilst thinking that all governmental and legislative devil- 
 try naturally come under the other meaningless word. If 
 this is so in politics is it not much more true, or should it 
 not be, of a definite and clear concern of science ? It is 
 my purpose to try in a general way to discover some happy 
 middle way, and to ask if we may not lift this unfortunate 
 question out of the silly bitterness and partizanship into 
 which it has fallen. To do so it is plain that we must seek 
 to make clear the truth and the error in the position of 
 each partizan, and thus to unite the good, dispassionate 
 people of both parties in a common cause, and by harmon- 
 ious methods, make all to work for ends desired of both, 
 and higher perhaps than either alone have heretofore 
 sought. 
 
 What is the Truth and Strength of the Antivivisec- 
 tion Party. Let us now leave out of sight all criticism, just 
 or unjust, all extremism and exaggeration, all sentimentality 
 and nonintellectuality, and seek to learn the essential 
 truth whence the antivivisectionists derive their strength, 
 and which must become at least one of the fundamental 
 principles of the credo of sensible people. The secret of 
 wisdom is to learn from your enemy; the true philosopher 
 knows that no controversialist has all the truth or is
 
 12 "VIVISECTION." 
 
 wholly in error, that opinion wins credence only by the 
 truth hidden, however deeply, somewhere in it. 
 
 It can scarcely be doubted that the primary condition of 
 human progress out of the most utter savagery, consisted 
 in the fact of the primitive man calling to his service and 
 aid the wild beasts about him. This view is brought out 
 with clearness in the most admirable book of Professor 
 Shaler on Domesticated Animals. " The process of domesti- 
 cation," he says, " has a far-reaching aspect, a dignity, we 
 may fairly say a grandeur, that few human actions possess. 
 If we can impress this view, it will be certain to awaken 
 men to a larger sense of their responsibility for, and their 
 duty to, the creatures which we have taken from their 
 older natural state into the social order. It will, at the 
 same time, enlarge our conceptions of our own place in 
 the order of the world." 
 
 It was by the domestication of wild animals that the 
 savage got his first lift out of lowest barbarism ; their food, 
 help, clothing and protection, directly and indirectly en- 
 abled one tribe or race to conquer the rival neighbor. 
 It did more : It helped to found and fix the idea and to 
 establish the fact of home-life, upon which all further pro- 
 gress depended, and upon which civilization itself rests. 
 It did more: During thousands and perhaps millions of 
 years this daily association with animals drew man out of 
 the bigoted subjectivity which is the great obstacle of all 
 mental development, as objectivity, sympathetic knowing 
 of other beings, is the condition of mental progress. His 
 animals became for man a sort of mirror wherein he saw 
 himself reflected, and from this self-study in others there 
 has gradually and progressively dawned upon humanity a 
 faint and growing recognition of the truth of the unity 
 and interdependence of all life. Tat twain asi, this (animal) 
 art thou, was the grand .truth condensed into a sentence 
 epitomizing much of the wisdom of Brahminic civilization.
 
 "VIVISECTION." 13 
 
 Forth from the unknown, inexplicable, awful, by the 
 subtle, mysterious agency of cell-life and of sexualism, 
 springs the million-fold, ever renascent forms of living 
 things, each dependent upon all others, just as literally 
 and exactly as in physics or chemistry each particle is in- 
 terrelated with others. No animal or man can live without 
 the aid of the vegetable, no animal or man without vital 
 relations with other animal forms, no man independent of 
 any or all other men. Each is his brother's keeper, whether 
 the " brother" be the blade of grass, the bacillus, the cow, 
 the savage, or the lawmaker. 
 
 Civilization is but just beginning to grow conscious of this 
 fact, but the consciousness has been aroused only by hard 
 knocks. It has taken great disasters of flood and drouth 
 and loss, only to begin to get into our heads the lesson of 
 the stupidity of the denudation of the country of forests. 
 Tuberculosis in cattle is teaching us that the cow is some- 
 thing more than a digesting, milk-giving, and meat-produc- 
 ing mechanism. The value of the product of the domestic 
 hen is greater than that of all our silver mines. The loss 
 of harvests by insects is millions of dollars annually. The 
 death-rate of the human race depends upon our knowledge 
 and control of the laws of lowly forms of life, and when 
 that knowledge and control are perfect we may halve or 
 quarter the mortality. 
 
 To this conception, science, reaching always last toward 
 the heart of the mystery, is slowly now groping her way. 
 But the truth is already plain : Commensalism, cosmic 
 commensalism, we may denominate the scientific aspect of 
 the truth of what we have called the unity and interde- 
 pendence of all the world's life. We are all brothers or 
 cousins and we feed at the same table. There is no truth 
 plainer than this, and disease and dependence are daily 
 convincing us of the existence of the close relationship and 
 of the fatuity of ignoring the rights of all living forms.
 
 14 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 Now it is the incomparable merit of the antivisectionists 
 and their allies that they have first recognized this all- 
 important truth. I agree with you if you dissent saying 
 they have only seen it partially, narrowly, and emotionally, 
 but that is no great criticism after all. They have seen it, 
 dumbly, and partially if you please, but still most vividly. 
 Their rational account of the matter may be faulty and 
 even ridiculous, but the heart always outruns the head, the 
 emotions always point out the objects and motives to the 
 intellect. Animals, all the worlds of living things, have 
 rights per se, and the sooner science builds upon that basis 
 the speedier will be the coming of her kingdom. Com- 
 mensalism is an inexpugnable fact. Utter and reckless use 
 of any living thing for human selfishness, with complete 
 indifference to the nature and rights of that living thing, is 
 as unscientific, as impolitic, and as suicidal as was slavery. 
 It is no great foresight to leave the hive enough honey for 
 it to live upon through the winter. That the honey should 
 be left because we love the bees is also quite as good a 
 motive as because it is good policy or to our selfish interest. 
 Sympathy or sentimentalism, properly understood, seems 
 to me eminently proper and good, and not a reason for con- 
 tempt or blame. "The great tide of mercy and justice 
 which marks our modern civilization had first to break 
 down the grievous and strongly founded evils of human 
 slavery. Having effected that great work, the sympathetic 
 motives are moving on to a similar conflict with the moral 
 ills which arise from an improper treatment of those slaves 
 of a lower estate, the domesticated animals." (Shaler.} 
 
 To have recognized even emotionally the fact of Life's 
 commensalism, to have earnestly, personally, vitally recog- 
 nized the fact of the unity, relationship, and interdepend- 
 ence of all life, to have seen it, however partially and 
 narrowly, but so acutely as to inspire a profoundly sincere 
 and unselfish zeal, this seems to me the ground and
 
 "VIVISECTION." 15 
 
 strength of the antivivisectionist cause. Upon this basis 
 they may safely build, for it is as inevitable as is the fact of 
 evolution itself, that evolution is builded, and will continue 
 its development, upon that principle. Whatever contradicts 
 it will be destroyed, because humanity and science will 
 both unite to work out our destiny in obedience to it. In 
 our upstart egotism, and flushed with scientific success, we 
 have at times so placed and so expressed ourselves as to 
 give the impression that we were not only indifferent to but 
 derisive of this principle and fact, and our vain conceit has 
 been answered by a responsive indignation which has 
 placed in the Antivivisection-lists many of the greatest 
 names of our civilization. If we have but a fool's wisdom 
 we will not repeat this unpardonable error. As protesters, 
 the strength of the antivivisection-protest has been, or has 
 seemed to have been in the denial of what has been, or of 
 what has seemed to have been, a contemptuous ignoring 
 of the unity-idea, an indifference to the rights per se of the 
 animal-world, an outrageous hypertrophy of human ego- 
 tism. Wherever such denial or forgetfulness of commen- 
 salism, such non-recognition of animal-right has existed, 
 wherever such inordinate exaggeration of human right has 
 shown itself, the vivisection-protest is valid, and will prove 
 to be valid so long as time and life lasts. It is at once 
 good sense and good science, to acknowledge this, and to 
 build future action upon the acknowledgment. 
 
 The Weakness and Errors of Antivivisectionists, 
 are, however, many and patent. They may all be summed 
 up in the one criticism that these good people have not in- 
 tellectualized their emotions. They have been zealous in 
 the right but so blindly passionate against but one form of 
 wrong, that their zeal has all the attributes of wrong. The 
 emotions are good incentives but poor guides. They need 
 to be rationalized and the way lit up by the sun of intellect. 
 Passions, angers, indignations, need the balance-wheel of
 
 16 "VIVISECTION." 
 
 logic to make them keep the world's true time. We 
 gladly acknowledge and fervently contend that, once for 
 all, the sentiment of kindness to animals is an acquirement 
 of modern civilization most profoundly precious and des- 
 tined to grow brighter, clearer, and more practiced with 
 every step of humanity's advance. Whoever disallows, or 
 derides, or even ignores it, is doomed. Let his name, in 
 the name of science and of humanity, be anathema ! 
 
 But there are perhaps ten or twenty million barns in the 
 United States with cracks everywhere through which one 
 may put the hand. Has any vivisection-society organized 
 itself to protect the millions of shivering animals who suffer 
 long bitter nights for long winter-months after laboring all 
 day for their careless owners ? I would like to join such 
 a society. There are billions of fish and crustacean animals 
 that are killed with slow tortures dragged out for days. 
 Who has protected them from unkindness ? In one ship- 
 ment of cattle from their free, breezy western homes to 
 Eastern or English markets, there is a thousandfold more 
 awful agony than ever was in all the laboratories of all the 
 world. What about the wretched hunting and gaming- 
 business ? What about the slaughter-houses ? Is death 
 in them preferable to death in a laboratory ? No sensible 
 man, good friends, objects to your objection against cruelty 
 in laboratories. Sensible people will aid you to stop lab- 
 oratory-cruelty, but sensible people will ask you to extend 
 the realm of your activity to other and to all places where 
 cruelty exists, and to expend your main force where it is 
 most needed. At present you are open to the charge that 
 you care for but one kind of cruelty and that a small order. 
 Do you want to educate the world in kindness ? Then by 
 all odds do so by going to the millions who are ignorantly 
 and continuously unkind, not only to the few dozen whom 
 you have selected. Is it cruelty you protest against, or is 
 it only the cruelty of a certain small class of men ?
 
 "VIVISECTION." 17 
 
 Another crying error of antivivisectionists is calling death 
 vivisection. Some time ago a most sensational account, 
 with roaring headlines and awful pictures, was published in 
 a New York newspaper of the vivisection atrocities carried 
 on in the Physiologic Department of Cornell University. 
 To call the cutting up of meat in a butcher-shop vivisec- 
 tion, and to have aroused indignation against the poor 
 butcher by headlines and pictures, would have been just as 
 honest and true. For the truth is that in this University 
 there has not been a single painful experiment since it 
 opened. Perhaps five hundred dead animals are there annu- 
 ally dissected, but only after a most humane and painless 
 death. Now this instance is only illustrative of the general 
 habit of antivivisectionists of charging those who kill ani- 
 mals for scientific purposes with cruelty and " vivisection." 
 At the same time against death in slaughter-houses, by 
 fish-dealers, hunters etc., there is no charge made, and no 
 blame is laid upon them. This is an unfortunate condition 
 of mind. Scientific men may justly claim that to those 
 who ruthlessly hunt animals for sport and thus produce 
 directly and indirectly a terrible amount of suffering, should 
 at least be meted out a hatred and denunciation as fervid 
 as against those who use them unselfishly in the service of 
 humanity and science. Not to have done this, to have 
 been guilty of this blind injustice, will ever remain the 
 shame and weakness of the antivivisection movement. I 
 have yet to learn that indignation against one kind of 
 cruelty rightly absolves a just conscience from the obliga- 
 tion of truthfulness and sincerity. 
 
 Indeed this principle deserves extension; until antivivi- 
 sectionists become practical vegetarians, they are at present 
 occupying a shameful and stultifying position. By " the 
 total prohibition of vivisection " they mean and represent 
 among other things the abolition of death in the laboratory. 
 But of course simple death in the laboratory and that in
 
 1 8 "VIVISECTION." 
 
 the slaughter-house or fish-boat must alike be justified by 
 the objects and methods of the death. In the one case it 
 is for the good of science, the conquering of disease, and 
 the life of humanity. In the other it is to feed the single 
 body of the eater of meat. The illogic and ludicrous posi- 
 tion of the meat-eating prohibitional vivisectionist is thus 
 worthy of the limitless contempt of rational beings. 
 
 It thus becomes clear that the problem of the whole 
 controversy widens itself out into the greater problem of 
 the use of the animal-world as food. When the prohibi- 
 tionist becomes a vegetarian, he is worthy of respect as a 
 logical person, but while he still eats meat, utterly indiffer- 
 ent to the death or kind of death his animal endured, and 
 passionately indignant against vivisectionists, he becomes 
 a very silly butt of ridicule. The antivivisectionist must 
 therefore straighten out this tangle and make theory and 
 practice tally, before he is worth the consideration of rea- 
 sonable people. 
 
 In order to be clear and not to evade any issue, I may 
 add that personally I object to doing my own butchering. 
 I would rather be a vegetarian, although I am not so silly 
 as to seek to avoid my moral responsibility for the death I 
 order with my cutlet. Butchering for mere sport's sake, 
 called " hunting," seems to me to touch a lower depth of 
 degradation, to which I trust never to fall. Trap-shooting 
 and senatorial gunning are of course unspeakably low. In- 
 deed, the practice of vegetarianism would seem to be de- 
 feative of the very object it has in view. I think. we eat 
 too much meat, that we are too indifferent to the animal 
 right, careless of the manner of death, etc., etc., but total 
 prohibition here would not only slow down the march of 
 humanity's progress, but it would be sadly detrimental to 
 animalian progress. As a matter of fact it has not been 
 human hunger or appetite that in an appalling manner is 
 exterminating whole species and genera of animals from
 
 "VIVISECTION." 19 
 
 the face of the earth, but it is the outrageous fury of the 
 hunter and of female vanity. Under proper restrictions and 
 laws the use of animals as food has served, and may still 
 further serve to perfect and beautify the animal world. Death 
 alone, uncruel death, for a useful purpose, least of all that 
 in the laboratory, threatens no animal genus with extinc- 
 tion, and in all our facing of the question, we need only to 
 keep in mind the object, the extent, and the method, of 
 our death-dealing. But while we have a ray of reason or 
 a line of logic in our minds, we must protest against the 
 antivivisectionist confusion, illogicality, and even misrepre- 
 sentation, that stigmatizes laboratory-killing as vivisection, 
 whilst innocently dining upon the products of the slaugh- 
 ter-house ; that would prohibit painless laboratory-experi- 
 ment, and laboratory-killing, while obliviously passing a 
 restaurant-window, or a train of stock-cars.* 
 
 Again, antivivisectionists weaken their own cause, lessen 
 the number of their sensible adherents, and do violence to 
 their own sense of truth by their intolerable denial of any 
 least good whatsoever gained by and through vivisection. 
 Now even in a good cause untruth does not pay. I regret 
 that I have not the space and time at present t adduce a 
 few examples out of hundreds that might easily be given 
 to show how erroneous is this dogmatism. The proofs 
 have often been gathered and it is unnecessary to repeat 
 the time-worn story. Thousands of children, for example, 
 are to-day growing to manhood and womanhood who 
 would have died without the diphtheria-antitoxin. (But 
 both sides to the controversy forget that the negative re- 
 sults, the showings that, except to the dispassionate in- 
 vestigator, are never shown, are quite as important in a 
 
 *See a series of excellent articles by J. Lawrence-Hamilton, M.R.C.S., on 
 Torturing and Starving Fish, Catching and " Crimping " Fish, etc., in The 
 Lancet of August 17, August 31, et^seq., 1889.
 
 20 VIVISECTION." 
 
 scientific sense as the positive rewards of experimental 
 medicine.) In reading these tiresome reiterations of dog- 
 matism and denial, in witnessing the repetitions year in 
 and out of this eyeless prejudice, one feels like despairing 
 of the sincerity and sanity of the human mind. I perfectly 
 agree that vivisection-experimentation has often been re- 
 sultless, and worse than resultless, the great men of 
 science, the great vivisectors themselves freely admit it 
 but to contend that every such experiment has led either 
 to resultlessness or even to error, this only could a heated 
 controversialist bring himself to say. The least investiga- 
 tion of the facts, and the least impartiality of judgment 
 would insure against such blundering. 
 
 Yet another way in which the antivivisectionists should 
 intellectualize their emotions consists in their neglected 
 duty to be just to the laboratory-men. Almost every line 
 they indite, or word they utter, betrays a deep vindictive- 
 ness, a bitterness of suspicion and hatred, that is, well, 
 let us say pitiable ! But what is the truth ? Are these 
 men seeking selfish aims? Are they brutish in their social 
 or family life ? Are they liars about other things (than this 
 controversial one) ? Is the medical profession the most 
 selfish, or in truth the most unselfish, aye, the most ludic- 
 rously charitable, of all the professions ? Are men who 
 devote themselves to humanitarian, impersonal, and scien- 
 tific ends in other callings as well as in this, likely to be 
 fiendish and cruel ? I frankly admit that some vivisection- 
 ists are selfish, scheming, despicable fellows but are they 
 all so ? Are not some of the antis also baddish folk ? Is 
 it truthful or judicial to condemn all men of a party or 
 class ? To your shame we ask, Who carry on, payless, the 
 terrible labors of the hospitals of the world ? Who have 
 reduced the death-rate of your civilization, and increased 
 the average length of human life by some years ? In whose 
 hands to-day is lodged the hope of ultimate freedom from
 
 "VIVISECTION." 21 
 
 disease, and its thousand resultant ills ? Who or what 
 class of men in all the weary world is bending its heroic 
 endeavors so zealously and so fearlessly to lessening the 
 world's miseries ? Who in fact and finally is doing as 
 much to lessen disease and suffering in the animals you 
 blindly love, as these same physicians who know as you do 
 not know, that disease in animal and man is the same ? 
 To your everlasting shame it is that you hate and oppose 
 them instead of aiding them. Love your lovable animals 
 wisely, not childishly, love them more, and you will work 
 with us and not against us ! If you can't enlarge your in- 
 tellect, at least enlarge your heart, and learn of vivisection- 
 ists how to make your animals healthy ! Who " crop " 
 your dog's ears and "worm" his tail, and " cadoganize," 
 bit, and blinker, your horses ? Is it the laboratory-man ? 
 Ah no ! It is Fashion, which you are all too careful not to 
 antagonize, and which delights to do its charity very vica- 
 riously ! 
 
 All of which leads to a linked corollary, the question 
 whether, by pushing a truth to its most reckless extreme, 
 you are not allying yourself with the forces that are antago- 
 nistic to civilization ? I have admitted that the unity of all 
 life, and by implication the care by human intelligence of 
 all lower life, is a fundamental principle that must hence- 
 forth guide all true biologic progress. I have admitted 
 that yours is the great honor of having, at least in part, 
 recognized this, and of having set yourselves to its practi- 
 cal realization. But the criticism has swiftly and neces- 
 sarily followed, that you have taken your duty too narrowly. 
 To love one dog or one horse, to the exclusion or to the 
 indifference of all other dogs and horses ; to love animals 
 rather than the animal kingdom, and to love the animal 
 kingdom rather than humanity, what shall we call this 
 but childishness ? 
 
 Or is it something else not so innocent as childishness ?
 
 22 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 Have you ever calmly asked yourself how much of 
 the antivivisection-cry is but the concealed expression of 
 Science-hatred ? I am not quite sure but that the " cry " 
 is often the masked growl of defeated bigotry and super- 
 stition filled with hereditary hatred of clear-eyed and con- 
 quering Science, swiftly marching from victory to victory 
 and ejecting from the last hiding-places of obstinate and 
 backward-looking minds their beloved errors, their cher- 
 ished ignorances, and their pleasant selfishnesses. With- 
 out some such an explanation, it is otherwise 'difficult to 
 account for the bitterness, the misrepresentation, the amaz- 
 ing celerity with which any club is grabbed, and the blind 
 fury with which it is wielded. A too passionate partizan- 
 ship argues the existence of unconfessed motives. If pure 
 pity of suffering animals were the sole sentiment inspiring 
 some of these pamphlets, it could hardly be so unmindful 
 of the awful suffering endured elsewhere than in labora- 
 tories. But this is an unpleasant and gruesome aspect ; 
 let us pass on to consider the other side of the question. 
 
 The Truth and Strength of the Vivisectionist Cause, 
 as all scientific men know, lies in the application of induc- 
 tive methods of research to the solution of the mysteries 
 of normal and morbid physiology. To those who are 
 untroubled by these mysteries, to those careless of the 
 awful burden of disease, its expense to biologic evolution 
 and civilization, to those also who are either ignorant of or 
 opposed to the inductive method of research, to all such, 
 of course, all experimental investigation is valueless. But 
 every mind which has once realized the tremendous im- 
 portance of science to humanity, recognizes with ever- 
 growing gladness, the profound usefulness of induction in 
 bringing light into the intolerable mystery of our life here. 
 Induction, as we all know, is reasoning from facts to prin- 
 ciples and laws. For thousands of years the sense of the 
 mystery surrounding us, in us, and of us, has with the com-
 
 " VIVISECTION." 23 
 
 mon people found satisfaction in faith or religion, which, 
 scientifically speaking, is often the voice of despair, and is 
 always the cry of renunciation of intellectual solution. Dur- 
 ing the same cycles the educated or more original minds 
 sought the solution of the mystery of being in deduction, 
 i. e., metaphysics and speculation. They never looked in- 
 quiringly at the causes and realities of the motions of the 
 planets, sun, and stars. They never observed the stratified 
 rocks on which they walked. They never asked the cause 
 of glandular action, never sought the origin of disease. 
 The awful pageantry of the biologic process swept on be- 
 fore their eyes like a dream, and they were utterly obliv- 
 ious of the strange mystery of themselves, of their bodies, 
 instincts, sensations, and minds. They spent their lives 
 in vain quibbles as to matter, mind, free-will, God, angels, 
 nominalism, realism, in everlasting delving and in dis- 
 cussion about things in the abstract. Finally, one man 
 after another appeared who said: Let us for once observe 
 things in the concrete, let us observe facts closely and 
 accurately and by linked logic proceed from single facts to 
 groups, and to ever-inclusive groupings and classifications, 
 until finally in this way law gleamed upon the eyes of 
 mankind, order arose out of chaos, and with her splendid 
 certainties and clearness was born Modern Science ! 
 Almost any single page of a recent text-book on chemistry, 
 physiology, or therapeutics, is worth to humanity the entire 
 inclusive product of metaphysics, and theology, and philo- 
 sophy, from Plato to Hegel. 
 
 It will, I think, appear, that I am by no means blind to 
 the errors and hypertrophies and limitations of the method 
 of induction, but in the minds of all awakened men, that it 
 is the most potent instrument in the discovery of truth, 
 there is no sort of doubt whatever. Now so far as physi- 
 ology and medicine are concerned, the inductive method 
 based in part on vivisection is one of the more, mind I do
 
 24 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 not even say the most but one of the more important con- 
 ditions of scientific accuracy and progress. Reasoning 
 from facts is impossible until the facts are known, and in 
 the exceptional difficulty of learning the facts of normal 
 and morbid bodily function, vivisection constitutes an im- 
 portant method of procedure. There is no blinking this 
 truth, and the opponents of justifiable or proper vivisection 
 must either acknowledge it or else take their places as 
 opponents of science and of humanitarian progress. Every 
 person who without prejudice has looked into the matter 
 must well know that without vivisection a large part of the 
 great body of physiologic and therapeutic truth of which 
 we are now in possession would not have existed, the death- 
 rate would have been far higher than it now is, and our 
 civilization would not have been nearly so far advanced as 
 it is. It is useless for me to catalogue the facts upon which 
 this assertion rests. They who deny either the assertion 
 or the facts do not know whereof they speak, or they do 
 not wish to know. 
 
 Just here, parenthetically, is suggested a strong con- 
 demnatory criticism of the prohibitional antivivisectionist, 
 a criticism that shows him (or her !) to be de facto, a de- 
 ductionist, and not an inductionist. Not one of them has 
 ever spent ten hours in a laboratory, not one has made a 
 scientific discovery. In other words, he (or she) has 
 opinions of a very pronounced sort, about matters without 
 inquiry and study and without first-hand observation of the 
 facts. Like the Scotch judge, having heard one side, he 
 has made up his mind, and does not wish to become pre- 
 judiced by hearing the defendant's attorney. No more con- 
 vincing proof is necessary of the vice of deductive reason- 
 ing! 
 
 I could enumerate a number of other, facts to the credit 
 of the experimental school of medicine, but the single one 
 mentioned is sufficient to place it infallibly upon the right
 
 VIVISECTION." 25 
 
 side in humanity's long warfare against ignorance and dis- 
 ease. It will be more instructive therefore if we proceed 
 at once to note : 
 
 The Limitations and Errors of the Vivisectionists. 
 The first that strikes one is an exaggeration of the impor- 
 tance and extent of the vivisection-method. As valuable 
 an aid as it is, it is not the only, and perhaps it is not the 
 chief method of ascertaining medical truth. It has with- 
 out doubt, often been used when other methods would 
 have been productive of more certain results. This has 
 arisen from what a large and broad culture of the human 
 mind perceives to flow from a recent and rather silly hyper- 
 trophy of the scientific method, and a limitation of that 
 method to altogether too material or physical aspects of 
 the problem. It may be true that so far as we see every 
 mental or biologic fact has its material counterpart. More 
 than this may be admitted: It is the especial province of 
 Science, to make sure of this physical aspect. But over 
 against these admissions must be placed the unscientific 
 bigotry, the unwarrantable dogmatism of the prejudice, 
 nay of the untruth, that the life or psyche is wholly and ab- 
 solutely explainable in terms of matter and mechanics.* 
 Truly scientific men have not been guilty of this wretched 
 travesty of truth, but certain plebificators of science who 
 
 * An Argument for Human Vivisection. A writer in a Western journal 
 makes a vigorous plea that criminals condemned to death should be first used 
 for vivisection purposes, and especially in the study of cerebral localization 
 and function. One argument adduced is exquisitely humorous, the humor be- 
 ing heightened by the innocent unconsciousness of the quality. The earnest 
 writer thus argues : 
 
 " Those who would be unfavorably impressed with this method of investiga- 
 tion should take kindly to the information that experiments of this kind on the 
 brain are no more unpleasant to the subject than like impressions aroused dur- 
 ing the sojourn of perfect liberty. There is every reason to believe that the 
 stimulus in a large number of instances would be highly pleasing. If, for ex- 
 ample, our subject experimented upon was a person who had been repeatedly 
 animated by the ludicrous, upon touching the seat of such impressions the 
 
 3
 
 26 < VIVISECTION." 
 
 have caught the public ear have harped upon it until they 
 have almost made the judge of us all enlightened public 
 opinion believe this is the genuine attitude of Science. 
 It is a fatuous and a bitter error, and the best scientific minds, 
 having suffered by the misrepresentation are making haste 
 to disallow the impertinents, and to set the world right as 
 to the true status of the matter. It has been the habit of 
 some to sneer at the so-called " vitalists," asserting with 
 reckless derision that thought is a secretion of the brain, 
 and life a property of matter. Except from a few we have 
 probably heard the last of such teaching. It may be a 
 truth, but until it is so proved scientific minds will not 
 assert it. So long as spontaneous generation is a foolish 
 untruth, so long as omne vivum ex vivo is disproved by no 
 single fact in the world, so long must the ranters and 
 dogmatists at least keep silence in the presence of logical 
 and educated minds. 
 
 But, as I have said, the influence of the dogmatists has 
 been too much in evidence in science and especially in 
 vivisection-practice. " It is," says Professor Mosso, the 
 biographer of the great Ludwig, "an error, to believe that 
 experiments can be performed upon an animal that feels. 
 The perturbation induced by pain in the functions of the 
 organism is so profound as to render useless the experi- 
 menter's study. It was Ludwig who uttered the celebrated 
 mot, that some physiologists, to study the nervous system 
 
 whole circumstance would be reproduced, attended with the same vivacity as 
 the original experience. Painful sensations would not be reproduced unless a 
 certain nucleus of cells was stimulated, and this could be avoided after its exact 
 location was ascertained. To secure cooperation and carry out the operation 
 successfully the condemned would be instructed with the nature of the work." 
 
 The childlike conviction that " the ludicrous " and that " pain" have de- 
 finitely localizable centers, and that all one would have to do in order to spend 
 a life in laughter would be to tickle the ludicrous-center with a galvanic needle, 
 is itself one of the most painfully ludicrous conceptions of pseudo-science that 
 we have ever met. Med. News, December 16, 1893.
 
 " VIVISECTION." 27 
 
 act like one who fires a pistol into a watch to see how the 
 chronometer works. Suffering should be entirely elimin- 
 ated from physiologic experiment, because the instruments 
 we employ to-day are so delicate that they become inser- 
 vicable the moment the animal is agitated or moves." 
 
 This admirable quotation perhaps leaves out of the count 
 certain experiments that require more or less long-contin- 
 ued suffering, and in which anesthesia would be impossible, 
 but in the main it is a truth that has been too much ne- 
 glected on the part of vivisectors. 
 
 I need not weary you with other similar errors, but pass 
 to another exaggeration, the over-emphasis of vivisection- 
 experiment and the neglect of clinical and pathologic re- 
 sults. The pathologic fact is a vivisection-experiment of 
 the very best kind and admirably conducted by nature. 
 We should trust it whenever possible, and not only the far 
 more bunglesome and uncertain one of artifice. Among 
 very many examples that might be cited, I shall give but 
 one. Dr. Seguin, of New York, it will hardly be disputed, 
 is a competent judge in the matter alluded to in the follow- 
 ing quotation : 
 
 " Horsley appears to assume that our progress in cerebral lo- 
 calization has been mainly dependent upon experimentation. 
 Here again we must differ from him. Clinical observation and 
 pathologic data come first (Broca for speech-center, Hughlings- 
 Jackson for a hand-center and general doctrine), the animal 
 experiments with detailed proofs by Hitzig, Ferrier, and others 
 long after ; .and the solid facts upon which we make our daily 
 localization diagnoses have been patiently accumulated by 
 pathologists, and would stand to-day supporting the doctrine of 
 cerebral localization if not one animal's brain had been touched. 
 Besides, in the case of the visual half-center, human pathologic 
 facts have overthrown the result of experimentation (Ferrier's 
 angular gyrus center), and have made us, for practical purposes, 
 indifferent to the contradictory results of Munk and Goltz. It
 
 28 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 is safe to say that every one of the so-called ' centers ' in the 
 human brain have been determined empirically by postmortem 
 proofs, independently of experimental data. What animal ex- 
 periments would have led us, for example, to locate the half- 
 center for ordinary vision in the cuneus, the center for the leg in 
 the paracentral lobule, and that for audited language in the left 
 first temporal gyrus? In this department of pathology medical 
 science has been strictly inductive and sufficient unto itself, 
 though receiving confirmatory evidence from the physiologist. 
 The first (speech) and the last (visual) centers have been discov- 
 ered by clinical and pathologic studies.* 
 
 Almost every point over which the controversy has raged 
 most fiercely has been in relation to one or all of the three 
 or four questions : 
 
 1. What is a vivisection experiment? 
 
 2. By whom should it be performed ? 
 
 * That this is not a solitary opinion may be gathered from the following 
 (unverified) quotations I have found. I do not assent to them either as true 
 or complete statements of the facts, and especially of later and properly-con- 
 ducted experimentation. I quote only to show that there are two sides to the 
 question, and the doubtful value of improperly-chosen or improperly-conducted 
 experimentation : 
 
 " In surgery I am not aware of any of these experiments on the lower ani- 
 mals having led to the mitigation of pain or to improvement as regards surgical 
 details." (Sir William Fergusson.) 
 
 " No single operation in surgery has been initiated by the performance of 
 something like it on the lower animals." (Sir William Fergusson.) 
 
 " All systems based on vivisection are false and ' illusory.' " (Nelaton.) 
 
 " Vivisection has done more to perpetuate error than to enforce the just 
 views taken from anatomy and the natural sciences." (Sir Charles Bell.) 
 
 " Vivisection has not only not helped the surgeon one bit, but has often led 
 him astray." (Lawson Tail.) 
 
 " The teachings of vivisection on the functions of the brain are a tissue of 
 error, and can only be corrected by clinical observations." (Brown-S6quard.) 
 
 " Confusion is the scourge of science, and it is the most striking result of 
 vivisection." (Sir Charles Bell.) 
 
 Majendie said " No physician would think of calling to his bedside a doctor 
 who derived his knowledge from a source so liable to error as vivisection."
 
 "VIVISECTION." 29 
 
 3. For what purpose should it be performed ? 
 
 4. By what method should it be carried out ? 
 
 In reference to all of these questions, scientific men 
 should unite and establish a common set of principles or 
 answers. In my judgment their failure to do so at all, and 
 besides this, their frequent exaggeration of logical limits 
 and just claims, has been one of the unfortunate causes of 
 useless and wasteful wrangling. 
 
 1. They have not taught their opponents or the com- 
 munity : I. What a vivisection-experiment is ; 2. How very 
 little of such experimentation there is ; 3. How little pain 
 or suffering there is attendant upon properly chosen and 
 properly conducted experimentation. They have, for 
 example, allowed the roar of controversial anger to go un- 
 rebuked that confuses death and vivisection. Dissection of 
 dead animals is not vivisection, of course, and at that one 
 stroke there falls to the ground at least three-fourths of the 
 present antagonism and prejudice. The vast majority of 
 all animals now used in experimental study are dead 
 animals. Again, if death at once follow experimentation 
 that has been painless, another large cause of unjust censure 
 falls pointless. Once more, if anesthesia prevents all the 
 pain of what would otherwise be painful experiment, sensi- 
 ble people cannot object to that, and thus another large ex- 
 cision is taken from the few remaining cases. As we all 
 know, but little painfulness or suffering attends the vastly 
 great majority of so-called vivisections. When experiment 
 upon a dead animal is meant do not let us permit the word 
 vivisection to be used. It is simply dissection or mortisec- 
 tion, if you please. If butchers are not to be prosecuted 
 or martyrized, certainly scientific men may be permitted to 
 carry out studies upon the dead animal. For the rest, why 
 not adopt Professor Wilder's words : callisection when pain- 
 less vivisection is meant, and sentisection, when it is painful? 
 
 2. I believe scientific men have made a grave mistake in
 
 30 VIVISECTION." 
 
 opposing the limitation of vivisection (not mortisection) 
 experimentation to those fitted by education and position 
 to properly choose, and properly execute such experiments. 
 No harm can come, and I believe much good would come 
 from our perfect readiness to accede to, nay, to advocate 
 the antivivisection desire to limit all experimentation to 
 chartered institutions, or to such private investigators as 
 might be selected by a properly chosen authority. This 
 limitation of course should be conditioned upon the ab- 
 solute freedom of (comparatively) painless killing by who- 
 ever may please to kill, or else the hunters, fishers, 
 slaughter-house men, and a hundred other killers of bed- 
 bugs, grasshoppers, etc., would have to be included, and 
 then the world would roar its laughter ! Mayn't we vivi- 
 sect tapeworms and pediculi? 
 
 At present the greatest harm is done true science by 
 men who conduct experiments without preliminary know- 
 ledge to choose, without judgment to carry out, without 
 true scientific training or method, and only in the interest 
 of vanity. It takes a deal of true science and patience to 
 neutralize with good and to wash out of the memory the 
 sickening, goading sense of shame that follows the know- 
 ledge that in the name of science a man could from a height 
 of 25 feet drop 125 dogs upon the nates (the spine forming 
 a perpendicular line to this point), and for from 41 to 100 
 days observe the results until slow death ended the animals' 
 misery. While we have such things to answer for, our 
 withers are surely not unwrung, and in the interest ot 
 science, if not from other motives, we have a right to 
 decide who shall be privileged to do them. 
 
 I have adduced this single American experiment, but 
 purposely refrain from even mentioning the horrors of 
 European laboratories. This is not because I would avoid 
 putting blame where it belongs, but because such things are 
 peculiarly prone to arouse violent language and passion,
 
 "VIVISECTION." 31 
 
 clouding the intellect and making almost impossible a de- 
 sirable judicial attitude of mind. The Teutonic race is to 
 be congratulated that it is guilty of at least but few 
 examples of the atrocities that have stained the history of 
 Latin vivisection, and before which, as before the records of 
 Roman Conquest and Slavery, or of the " Holy Inquisi- 
 tion," one shudders at the possibilities of mental action, in 
 beings that bore the human form and feature. Shaler con- 
 tends that it was the domestication of animals that enabled 
 the Aryan and Teuton to conquer his adversary, and that 
 has since civilized the conqueror. Thus long friendship 
 with animals has given us a freedom from guilt that is fortu- 
 nate for Teutonic peoples and science. 
 
 Vivisection is out of place in the public schools. In the 
 interests of pedagogy, as well for the benefit of the pupil's 
 morality as for the promotion of true science, scientific men 
 should oppose with a common voice any such caricature 
 and subversion of their aims and methods. Children should 
 not, of all things in the world, " be familiarized with the 
 sight of blood, etc., etc." * 
 
 * Antivivisection for Children. It strikes us that of all men physicians 
 should be foremost and most emphatic in their denunciation of vivisection in 
 the public schools or in any schools except those for adults and those especially 
 devoting themselves to medical or biologic science. The matter would hardly 
 seem to need argumentation. Every right-minded person must know, and doubt- 
 less must painfully remember in his own case, how callous children are to suffer- 
 ing and even how verily diabolic they often are as tormentors of animals over 
 which they have power. It would also seem perfectly plain that the practice of 
 vivisection before or by such highly imitative beings would have one certain 
 effect : to increase enormously the already thoughtlessly or consciously cruel ten- 
 dencies of their natures. " Appetite grows by eating." In medieval times the 
 great gala days were the days si auto daft. Gay cavaliers and gay ladies flirted 
 and laughed for hours before men slowly being burned to death. They were 
 no more intentionally or really cruel than boys to-day who pour coal-oil over 
 dogs and burn them to death. 
 
 Would vivisection in public schools have other effects more than compensa- 
 tory for the evil ? Clearly and decidedly not. In the first place, dissection
 
 32 "VIVISECTION." 
 
 3. The true object, the principal if not the only one, of 
 vivisection, should be the eliciting of new truth. To this 
 end also, any one may sacrifice by painless death as many 
 animals as he pleases, so long a most remote possibility 
 as the extermination of no species is threatened. Shall 
 it not be as right to kill rabbits for scientific purposes, 
 as for sport, or to rid the harassed Australian farmer of the 
 pests? We must ever insist on this distinction between 
 use of the dead animal and true vivisection. One may 
 painlessly kill animals also in order by further experiment 
 to acquire manipulative or surgical skill, and for didactic 
 purposes, in medical or scientific schools. Death of plente- 
 ous and prolific animals, is per se no evil, and cannot be 
 legislated against or morally forbidden ; and the same rule 
 will hold as regards all callisection, or painless vivisection. 
 But I believe that the most enlightened judgment and feel- 
 ing of the world will not justify much or any severe senti- 
 section (painful vivisection) for didactic purposes or for the 
 acquirement of operative technic. In the interests of 
 science, again, as well as of morality, scientific men should 
 set their faces sternly against such things. 
 
 and anatomy and the advanced physiology to be gained by vivisection are not 
 fit studies for the child-mind, but are plainly adapted and adaptable only to a 
 maturer age, and for those preparing to become physicians or specialists. The 
 child-mind by its very nature is not analytic, and any attempt to force it into 
 anlaytic studies before a riper season, is squarely contrary to pedagogic science. 
 It is not only against the child's nature and bound to prove unsuccessful, but, 
 if possible, it would not be desirable. We need to teach the young mind the 
 beauty of life, not the analysis of death. In educational methods we are at 
 last fairly emerging from the barbarism of the study of dead things by dead 
 methods and by dead-alive teachers. Do not let us encourage any such rever- 
 sion to the barbarism of medievalism, as turning the kindergarten, that divine 
 promise of a future civilization, into a miniature dissection-room or laboratory 
 for experimental physiology. Moreover, in the interests of physiology, of 
 medicine, and of science itself, we should protest against such physiology as 
 would be taught in the public schools by the present day (or promised) school- 
 teacher. Med. News, August 77,
 
 " VIVISECTION." 33 
 
 4. The proper method of using animals for experimental 
 purposes should combine scientific seriousness and rigor 
 with the tenderest kindness to the animals. There is a 
 subtle and beautiful law of psychology that only the unity 
 of right object and careful method is productive of good 
 results. Matter and manner must go hand in hand. Mor- 
 ality is a part of intellect, and a large part. When you see 
 a vivisector pretending to be scientific, but whose every act 
 and word indicates brutality to his fellow men, the politi- 
 cian, the selfish schemer, vulgarity of mind and banality 
 of manner, rest assured his laboratory-experiment is 
 vitiated with falsehood and error, and scientifically is 
 utterly valueless. To jeer at and deride " sentimentality " 
 while pretending to be working for the good of humanity 
 (a sentiment, if ever there was one !) is hypocritic and 
 flagrant self-contradiction. This attitude of mind on the 
 part of a few men does more to arouse the indignation of 
 opponents than any cruelty itself. Scientific men should 
 root out of their ranks such poor representatives. They 
 are enemies in the scientific household. Dr. Klein, a phy- 
 siologist, before the Royal Commission testified that he 
 had no regard at all for the sufferings of the animals he 
 used, and never used anesthetics except for didactic pur- 
 poses, unless necessary for his own convenience, and that 
 he had no time for thinking what the animal would feel or 
 suffer. It may be denied, but I am certain a few American 
 experimenters feel the same way and act in accordance with 
 their feelings. But they are not by any means the majority, 
 and they must not only be silenced, but their useless and 
 unscientific work should be stopped. They are a disgrace 
 both to science and humanity. Over against Klein and 
 those of his way of feeling let us set the example of the 
 great Ludwig, he who has done more for physiology than 
 a thousand Kleins, he whose influence for scientific truth 
 has been the greatest of any physiologist in Europe. 
 4
 
 34 "VIVISECTION." 
 
 " No physiologist," says his biographer, " has ever 
 sought with greater frankness than Ludwig to impose just 
 limits on vivisection. The gates of his institute were ever 
 open to all who wished to assure themselves that he, in 
 the midst of his experiments, knew how to spare suffering. 
 The vivisector's art attained such perfection in his hands 
 that, having to sacrifice an animal, he did not let it feel 
 that it was even being tied. He would apply the muzzle 
 and instantly proceed to the exhibition of ether or chloro- 
 form, which, in a few seconds, in a dog, for example, made 
 it insensible." 
 
 In America we have one great anatomist the circles of 
 whose scientific beneficence are ever widening and deepen- 
 ing, who acts as did Ludwig. No man ever had a more 
 sympathetic and tender regard for all lower life than he. 
 His cat-home is a marvel of ingenuity and kind carefulness, 
 over which hangs the motto 
 
 " Snugly housed and fully fed, 
 Happy living and useful dead." 
 
 By this man not a single painful experiment is found 
 necessary to illustrate his physiologic teachings, although 
 some five hundred or more animals are annually killed 
 with perfect painlessness. His laboratories and homes of 
 animals are always open to inspection, gladly, proudly 
 exhibited, and if you want a pet he will give you your 
 choice out of an extensive collection. 
 
 And this brings me to what I can but conceive as a 
 grave and profound mistake on the part of the experi- 
 mentalists, their secrecy. I well know that bigotry and 
 prejudice may misrepresent. The whole history of the 
 cycle-long struggle of the medical profession to obtain 
 human dissection-material in the study of anatomy shows 
 that the public mind has been hard to win over from its 
 repugnance to the use of the dead human body for educa-
 
 "VIVISECTION." 35 
 
 tion in anatomy. But that day is now nearly or quite past, 
 and the policy of secrecy is to be replaced by one of the 
 most complete frankness and openness. In his recent 
 presidential address, Dr. Thomas Dwight of the Harvard 
 Medical School said : 
 
 " From careful observation I am convinced that the policy 
 which will lead to the most satisfactory results is one of complete 
 openness ; that above all, we should avoid a timidity which shirks 
 discussion of this topic. When we shall show so clearly as to 
 carry conviction, that we have nothing to conceal, a great step 
 will have been taken. I like to boast that the anatomical depart- 
 ment of the Harvard Medical School is ready to give an account 
 of every body it receives. If there be aught in the management 
 of dissecting rooms that calls for criticism, I would not have re- 
 form forced upon us from without. Let us be the first to antici- 
 pate every reasonable demand." 
 
 It is precisely in this spirit that the experimental school 
 of medicine should meet the antivivisectionists and the 
 world. A truly scientific man is necessarily a humane 
 man, and there will be nothing to conceal from the public 
 gaze of anything that goes on in his laboratory. It is a 
 mistake to think our work cannot bear the criticism of such 
 enlightened public sentiment as exists here and now; if 
 there is necessary secrecy there is wrong. People gener- 
 ally are not such poor judges as all that. The openness 
 will at one stroke eliminate the pseudoscientists and 
 greatly calm the overwrought and erroneous public appre- 
 hension. I would even go further: Every laboratory 
 should publish an annual statement setting forth plainly the 
 number and kind of experiments, the objects aimed at, and 
 most definitely the methods of conducting them. At 
 present the public somewhat ludicrously but sincerely 
 enough grossly exaggerates the amount and the char- 
 acter of this work, and by our foolish secrecy we feed 
 the flame of their passionate error. An organized syste-
 
 36 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 matic and absolute frankness, besides self-benefit, would at 
 once, as it were, take the wind out of our opponents' sails. 
 Do not also let us have " reform forced upon us from with- 
 out," in this contention, but by going more than half way 
 to meet them, by the sincerest publicity, show that as well 
 as scientists and lovers of men we are also genuine lovers 
 of animals. Faith, hope, and love, these three ! To faith 
 in knowledge, to hope of lessening human evil, we add 
 love love of men, and of the beautiful living mechanisms 
 of animal-bodies placed in our care. He who unnecessarily 
 hurts one of these, is a disgrace to science and to humanity. 
 As it appears to me this most unfortunate controversy, 
 filled with bitterness, misrepresentation, and exaggeration, 
 is utterly unnecessary. Both of the sharply-divided hate- 
 filled parties are at heart, if they but knew it, agreed upon 
 essentials, and furiously warring over nonessentials and 
 errors. I frankly confess that one side is about as much 
 at fault as the other, and that the whole wretched business 
 is a sad commentary upon the poverty of common charity 
 and good sense. There have been far more passion, shriek- 
 ing, grunting, and growling than becomes rational beings. 
 The only comforting thing in it all is the righteous convic- 
 tion of everybody concerned that at heart it is an awfully 
 serious and important concern. But this hardly justifies 
 either hysteric falsetto or leonine roaring. When good 
 women call good men devils, and good men retort Liars ! 
 it commences to get disgusting or ludicrously opera 
 bouffe. Cannot we ignore the ranters and extremists of 
 both parties, behave like decent folk, get together, strike a 
 balance sheet of our common follies and common excellen- 
 cies, and find that at last we are very much alike, and in- 
 deed, have no real quarrel ? Of course scientists can have 
 nothing to do with those who cry no quarter ! But the 
 advocate of the total prohibition of vivisection can be 
 brought to see the error of his (or her) ways, or can be
 
 " VIVISECTION." 37 
 
 cheerfully allowed to go those ways with the amused pity 
 of all sensible people. For the rest there is by no means 
 an infinite and unbridgeable chasm separating the two 
 parties. Every good scientist is as much interested in pro- 
 moting kindness to animals as the most devoted member 
 of S. P. C. A., and I would add that it is his duty to join 
 such organizations and help to carry on their proper work. 
 Possibly he may serve to intellectualize that work some- 
 what and make it more effective. Pardon me for again allud- 
 ing to Ludwig, the great scientist, the greatest of vivisectors, 
 and one of the greatest lovers of animals. It will doubt- 
 less surprise some extremists to be told that a vivisector 
 can be as great a protector of animals from cruelty as the 
 best of them, and the sting of the surprise and incredulity 
 comes from the sad confession that it is much of it our 
 own fault. But " Ludwig was President of the Leipsic 
 Society for the Protection of Animals, and remained to 
 the last one of its most active members. Germany owes 
 it to him that her horses and beasts of burden are now 
 humanely treated. To him is due that awakening of the 
 true humanitarian spirit toward the brute creation that cul- 
 minated in the ' Verband der Thierschutz-vereine des 
 Deutschen Reichs ' (Union of German Societies for the 
 Protection of Animals). It was mainly from her sense of 
 the gentler attitude to be encouraged toward animals on 
 the part of the rising generation that Leipsic made him an 
 honorary citizen on the fiftieth anniversary of his gradua- 
 tion in medicine." Can we not, shall we not, rise to the 
 easily- attained height of a similar dignity and magnanimity ? 
 Let us have peace ! 
 
 Perhaps it may not be possible to unite the two parties 
 in a common cause. The earlier sins and mistakes of a 
 good man are likely to cling to him like a Nessus-shirt, 
 and bar his later progress. Most men would rather be 
 consistent than to be right. If it is really impossible to get 
 
 281.173
 
 38 " VIVISECTION." 
 
 the experimentalists and the antivivisectionists to cancel 
 their mutual errors and exaggerations the things wherein 
 they disagree and unite in a common propagandism of 
 their mutual truths and beliefs, if this desirable and right 
 ideal is impossible, then it is time to form a new order or 
 society aiming to correct the errors of both parties, gen- 
 eralize and systematize the essential purposes of both, and 
 more important still to extend its field of labor beyond 
 the present narrow confines and limited range. 
 
 I wish there might be an International Biologic League 
 formed for the general protection and safeguarding of 
 animals and plants from cruelty and destruction. Human 
 progress and civilization have united at last to put into our 
 hands the care and destiny of all lower forms of life upon 
 the globe. The ingenuity, prolificity, and restlessness of 
 humanity have at last brought man into destructive con- 
 tact with every order of lower life, and with a more than 
 savage stupidity he has begun a suicidal and impious ex- 
 termination of many types. Once gone these are forever 
 gone, and a large culture can only feel genuine anguish at 
 such a terrible end as seems threatened. It is time some 
 such organization of biologists should undertake to extend 
 the egis of human care over the fate of our cosmic life, 
 and secure from all governments such laws as shall pre- 
 vent the ruinous destruction of infinitely beautiful and 
 valuable types. Already many species of birds have dis- 
 appeared in historic times, and our barbaric milliners and 
 their thoughtless customers are still furiously at their 
 frightful work. One dealer last year sold 2,000,000 bird- 
 skins. The world's most wonderful and intelligent animal, 
 the elephant, is doomed, 100,000 a year being slaughtered 
 to provide billiard balls, every pound of ivory costing also a 
 human life. Our buffaloes and moose are about gone, and 
 the seals are soon to go, with many wonderful inhabitants 
 of the earth's waters. Future scientists will look back at us
 
 " VIVISECTION." 39 
 
 of to-day aghast at our blindness and heedlessness. Some 
 gleams and hints of prudence exist, as for example, the 
 forbidding of hunting in our national parks, our Govern- 
 ment Fish Commission, etc., but how far is all triis from 
 a generalized and international system, that should prepare 
 universal laws and plans for biologic Retreats or Sanctu- 
 aries, that should protect the head-waters of our rivers 
 from deforestation, and prevent them from being made 
 foul sewers, that should guard against upsetting the deli- 
 cate balance between animal and vegetable life, immin- 
 ently threatened by the thoughtlessness, brutality, and 
 avarice of destructive man. Before such an ideal how con- 
 temptibly petty seem the unseemly bickerings of the 
 whole vivisection controversy !
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE.* 
 
 One of the most amusing inconsistencies of a small class 
 of minds otherwise progressive, scientific and rational, is 
 their unreasoning conservatism concerning the spelling and 
 use of certain words. In any other subject, for instance 
 therapeutics or surgery, they will welcome investigation, and 
 further it, admitting the duty of improving upon the old, 
 and of pushing on toward a more simple and perfect 
 science. But when you suggest that language, the tool of 
 thought, deserves consideration, is very clumsy and archaic, 
 is capable of being improved, at once they shrink and are 
 shocked at your temerity. 
 
 This attitude of hatred of innovation in one single field 
 of human activity, while admitting the law of progress in 
 all other departments, is also coupled with a second incon- 
 sistency; a dogmatism of conviction that the change or 
 modification of language urged is barbarous, almost 
 sacrilegious, that you are a sort of ill-bred upstart and 
 ignoramus in advocating it, and that the old form you 
 desire to supplant is the correct one, while your new- 
 fangled thing is absurd and is born of ignorance. The 
 bigotry of the average Englishman in these matters is a 
 charming exhibition of medieval-mindedness translated to 
 an age of civilization and progress. He actually thinks 
 that the spelling-reformer, however infinitesimal and micro- 
 scopic the spelling-change advocated, is the product of 
 " Americanism," and of American ignorance of how to 
 
 * Delivered at the Meeting of the American Medical Editors' Association, 
 held at Atlanta, May, 1896. 
 
 40
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 41 
 
 spell. The American inheritor of the English dogmatism 
 tries to hide his feeling, shrinks from such laughable 
 exposure of his own ignorance, and even covers the sheep- 
 skin of his ignorance with the lion-skin of erudition. 
 I shall not soon forget a contributor whose English was 
 equal in barbarity to that of our average senator, whose 
 spelling by any standard was atrocious, and whose medical 
 ideas were of course on a par with their means of expres- 
 sion ; but he was certain of one thing, that he wanted 
 hemorrhage " spelled rightly, with a." This to him was 
 the symbol of scholarship, his nose was safely in the 
 sand of erudition, but his whole body was delightfully 
 visible. 
 
 I have had the pleasure of replying to but three or four 
 critics of a few tiny philologic reforms or changes that 
 seemed to me wise. Besides these four the world seems 
 content either to accept or to reject in silence. I was 
 struck by the fact that in all four of the speaking objectors 
 their objections were solely based upon two foundations : 
 their personal dislike of change, and their complete 
 ignorance of philology. Concerning the argument, de gus- 
 tibus, there is surely no discussion, because taste, proverb- 
 ially, is simply a subjective affair. But dogmatic opinion 
 upon a subject in dispute, the deeply-rooted dogmatism 
 upon things without a single minute's study of them or of 
 their history, this in a supposably scientific man is, 
 well ! let us call it, deplorable. It is amusing, even instruc- 
 tively amusing, but it is, once more, deplorable. Such a 
 person, if a surgeon, would be shocked if you asked him 
 to pronounce dogmatically upon an unstudied question of 
 therapeutics or of mental disease, or if a diagnostician he 
 would not express the least judgment as to cataract-extrac- 
 tion, etc., but without an instant's study of philology he 
 settles a philologic dispute off-hand and forever. Five 
 minutes of glancing through any one of the hundreds of
 
 42 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 books on the subject would have closed his lips, but that 
 does not give him pause. He is sustained by the fact that 
 " the English language as now written is good enough for 
 me," and there floats through his mind hazy ideas that 
 etymology demands the present method, and that at best 
 you are a very bothersome and conceited person. 
 
 To one who has pondered the subject, however little, it 
 must be painfully apparent that every other product uncon- 
 sciously developed in the evolution of the race, whether 
 plows, guns, matches, or books, has been found capable 
 of betterment, and all civilization consists in improvement 
 of or improvement upon the crude devices of early awk- 
 wardness. Why should language then be an exception to 
 the rule ? Those who have examined carefully aver that 
 our language is a sorry instrument of thought, and bears 
 about the same likeness to an ideal language that a hand- 
 sickle does to the best reaping and binding machine of 
 our day. It is plain, therefore, that the obstinate prejudice 
 against any change whatsoever in it is most ill-advised and 
 unreasonable. 
 
 We do not advise radical changes. The proper attitude 
 of mind is one that welcomes slow and slight changes to- 
 ward shortening and thus lessening the severe burden of 
 education, and the expense of printing. Reform has a 
 double motive here, psychologic and commercial. It has 
 been estimated that our outrageous spelling costs one year 
 of school-life of every child. The financial saving by les- 
 sening every printed page one line would probably pay the 
 expenses of our government, and perhaps also retire on a 
 life-pension the Senate besides. This line could be saved, 
 and at least a day or two of the wasted school-life spared 
 by abolishing ce and ce, by lopping off a few redundant tails 
 of words, and by observing a half-dozen little rules, all of 
 which are not only advisable but philologically necessary, 
 not only not improper but genuinely proper.
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 43 
 
 As to e, and 02, these diphthongs are difficult to write, and 
 they are against the genius of the language. They have 
 already been sloughed in a large number of words, and 
 those who oppose what they are pleased to call " the mu- 
 tilation of our beloved language," must answer our demand 
 for a rule. Shall we reinsert the e, and 02, in words at 
 present spelled with e, and which were derived from older 
 words spelled with the darling diphthongs ? And if you 
 spell h&morrhage, will you, as you should, pronounce it 
 he'-mor-aj ? It seems to me the etymologic sticklers are 
 false to the old love, however true they may be to the new. 
 Most of our words, for example, beginning with pre are 
 derived from the Latin pre. There are possibly a thousand 
 of these words, such as prescription, prepuce, pretend, pre- 
 ference, etc. Shall we spell them all prescription, prepuce, 
 etc ? Shall we also be (etymologically) correct and write 
 heresy, heretic, anapest, poeony, phenomenon, meander, 
 hematite, ether, demon, esthetic, apharesis, dieresis, arche- 
 ology, paleography, gangrene, pedobaptist, cenobite, ceme- 
 tery, celestial, ceconomy, epicene, cesophagus, phaznix, solec- 
 ism, and hundreds of derivatives and similar words as they 
 are here written ? Will you spell diocese, dicecese f Will 
 you spell f ancy , frantic , and frenzy with a very etymologic- 
 ally proper ph, instead of an incorrect f?- If so, your 
 phancy will make your readers phrenzied, and you phrantic, 
 I fear. Will you write tansy, treacle and treasure with a 
 th ? If so, lay up your threasure in heaven, and drink much 
 threacle and thansy while your days do last. 
 
 Etymologic spelling is a long-exploded absurdity. It has 
 led many a poor word-grubber into the quagmires of absurd- 
 ity. It was, says the great English etymologist, a sort of 
 mania in the sixteenth century, and has thrown confusion 
 and ridicule into the study of language. " Its ignorant 
 meddlesomeness introduced many false forms," so that 
 hardly any word now tells its genesis or history by its
 
 44 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 written form. Every word must be examined separately, 
 its changes both of form and sound must be studied his- 
 torically, before we can know much about it. The final 
 dictum of Skeat is as follows : 
 
 " The shortest description of modern spelling is to say 
 that, speaking generally, it represents a Victorian pronun- 
 ciation of ' popular ' words by means of symbols imper- 
 fectly adapted to an Elizabethan pronunciation, the sym- 
 bols themselves being mainly due to the Anglo-French 
 scribes of the Plantagenet period, whose system was meant 
 to be phonetic. It also aims at suggesting to the eye the 
 original forms of ' learned ' words. It is thus governed by 
 two conflicting principles, neither of which, even in its own 
 domain, is consistently carried out." 
 
 It may be said that as many of our medical terms are 
 not derived from the Greek or Latin by a real and historical 
 process, but are de novo creations, using the ancient roots 
 and stems as convenient materials of coinage, the objection 
 does not hold, and that our words do therefore show their 
 originals by their form. Alas ! not even this poor excuse 
 bears scrutiny. The centuries have infected the modern 
 word-minter, and the inevitable hurry and destiny of evo- 
 lution will not let the need of condensation rest. Even 
 while we look at our printed dictionary the Zeitgeist is tele- 
 scoping our words. Who now says thyreoid and choreoid? 
 These forms are perfectly proper, and your dictionary-man 
 with the awful sword of " etymology " and conservatism 
 held across his path, may be forced to write them so, but 
 he smiles sadly as he does it and shakes his head despond- 
 ently. Every one of the hundreds of words ending in -old 
 is derived (supposably) from the Greek etfo?. Why, then, 
 is it -oid and not -eid? Bulb and Bulbar should be bolb and 
 bolbar, as they come from /Jo/l/So?. Croup is from A. S. kro- 
 pan. How can an etymology-lover write hyoid? What re- 
 semblance is there to the Greek word ? Ourconvenient com-
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 45 
 
 pound word should etymologically be spelled thyreo-hyoeid, 
 instead of thyro-hyoid. Why is one who forbids one literal 
 iota of change in present words so utterly indifferent about 
 the changes that have already crept in in the past? There 
 are thousands of words in which Greek i has been changed 
 to English e, as, e.g., all the words ending in rhcea. He is 
 wrathful because one wants to change them to rhca ; why 
 not so to those who changed the original i to e? He is as 
 idolatrous of his beloved thousand hams, but the Greek 
 was hai and not hce. One of the most ludicrous instances 
 of this imaginable is the very new coinage which its author 
 spells cceliotomy. The anger of enraged Jupiter was as 
 nothing to that aroused by the suggestion to shorten this 
 to celiotomy. But in that word as given out, there is, " once 
 you trip on it," perhaps not " twenty-nine," but at least two 
 or three " distinct damnations, one sure if another fails." 
 Why in the name of holy etymology, if derived from Greek 
 xoj/U'a do we have c instead of k, and why cce instead of coi-t 
 If the ccelia is derived from the Latin, then why the hybrid ? 
 Surely one who pretends passionate devotion to pretty 
 Ettie Mollie G., must not at the same time be paying 
 court to her hated rival, the little illegit Miss Hybrida.* 
 
 Every page of the dictionaries proves the absurdity of 
 trying to make spelling teach etymology ; and it is a fact 
 that not anybody, certainly not spelling-reformers, more cer- 
 tainly not the conservatives, cares two beans for the ety- 
 mology. If we did not have the printed word to stamp 
 the coin it would be a different matter, but with diction- 
 aries everywhere to give the origins and histories of all 
 words, what imaginable service or usefulness is there in 
 the attempt to load each down with its biography ? In 
 
 * Another sorry neoplasm is uranalysis, " analysis of ur" to replace an 
 equally absurd word, urinalysis, " alysis of urin." We have looked in vain 
 for the words alysis, and ur.
 
 46 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 reading or speaking no one can think or wishes to think of 
 the roots thousands of years old. As well demand that 
 your bouquet of roses shall have their roots and soil. The 
 investigating botanist may do so, and may know all about 
 the root and branch and stem, but workaday folk are not 
 botanists or radical philologists. If one in reading had to 
 know or keep in mind a half- conscious recognition of the 
 etymology of each word, he would be able to read about 
 one book a year, civilization and science would stagnate, 
 and we might, could, would, or should all become congress- 
 men, millionaires, or jingoes. 
 
 The only proper and sensible purpose of spelling is its 
 phonetic purpose. All the philologic tories of all christian- 
 dom or heathendom combined cannot prevent the inevita- 
 ble modifications even entire changes of the spoken 
 sound. In that witches' cauldron of modern English, es- 
 pecially the medical variety, we have from every source 
 cooked a most remarkable hodgepodge of illogic and incon- 
 sequential conglomeration. Our ancestors have com- 
 manded us to eat of it, but do not let us choke it down, 
 hiding our tears of disgust, and vowing it is incomparably 
 toothsome. We assuredly should not with glee add more 
 of the worst to the olla podrida, and when we have a justi- 
 fiable opportunity to make it a millionth part better, we 
 should not set up a cry of revolt, and cry, sacrilege ! In 
 an African forest the trail or pathway has constantly recur- 
 ring detours, angles and curves, so that one walks about 
 twice as far as necessary to reach landsend. No object 
 prevents following a straight line. Why is this ? It is 
 because once a tree blew down here across the path, there 
 a limb broke off, there a stone rolled down. So the savage 
 went around these objects, forming a new and crooked 
 path. When the termites devoured the tree the new trail 
 was more worn than the old one, and with thoughtless 
 imitation the men kept on laboriously winding and twist-
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 47 
 
 ing their way instead of going straight on and across. It 
 is the barbarian's habit of mind to keep on the unreasoning 
 way his predecessor traveled. It is the essence of civiliza- 
 tion to make straight the way. The incongruities of medi- 
 cal nomenclature and the stock-still standing of irrational 
 conservatism lead one to wonder if we are ever to awaken to 
 the need of philologic civilization. No judicious reformer 
 asks for revolution, but for evolution ; we need be in no 
 hurry ; we should not make profound and radical changes, 
 because (and only because) it is impossible to bring them 
 about ; but when men oppose every jot and tittle of change, 
 when they fight against one single conscious change of 
 precisely the same kind as has already been a thousand 
 times unconsciously wrought, then surely one must with 
 open-eyed astonishment ask, Really, now, were you not 
 born in Africa ? 
 
 I wish again to emphasize the limitation that we do 
 not advise one clean straight jump into phonetic spelling, 
 simply because it is impossible. We seem like some 
 mothers, the uglier and sicklier our orthographic child 
 the more we love and cherish it. The maternal love is 
 wise, but the other is mania. Turn to Germany and what 
 do we find? So far as phonetic writing is concerned their 
 language was already marvelously perfect, but because it 
 was not entirely perfect the Germans within a few past 
 years have made it so. With us, whose spelling is the butt 
 of the world's ridicule, with us we shriek our parrot-anger 
 or growl our ursine bigotry if one suggest lopping off a 
 supernumerary finger from our hideous teratologic thing. 
 What kind of a nation is this Germany ? Well, for one 
 thing, she delights to pay her debts with value-received, 
 while another nation we know of, from the hollows of lost 
 manhood and politic poltroonery, squeaks and squizzles its 
 senatorial sixteen to one. Another thing about this foolish 
 Germany is that when a foolish nation attacks her, at once
 
 48 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 her edict of blood and iron goes forth, and in a hurricane 
 of heroic energy her legions sweep resistless over a con- 
 quered land into the capital city of the world, and crown 
 her Emperor there in the coronation-halls of dead Bour- 
 bonism. How is it with another nation ? To show our 
 braggart boorishness we intermeddle in another nation's 
 rebellion, or we espouse the cause of a half-barbaric folk 
 thousands of miles away, for whom we do not care a fig, 
 against the world's one great civilizing and colonizing 
 nation, and with a corporal's guard of 25,000 soldiers cry, 
 War, War, War! How is it with Germany as to science 
 generally, and education, and especially as to medical 
 science ? The thousands of our young men sent to her 
 laboratories is sufficient answer. Well, this nation, as I 
 have said, in a few years, and at one sweep, has cut the 
 Gordian knot of spelling, simplified and shortened education 
 thereby, and while we are squirming and making wry 
 mouths over a few paltry and insignificant changes, she has 
 wholly reformed the language that Goethe and Lessing 
 wrote. 
 
 One of my four kind critics once wrote me remonstrat- 
 ing, solely on the ground of euphony, against cutting the 
 -al off the tail end of many adjectives ; " he didn't like it," 
 he said, " it didn't sound well." He seemed wholly 
 forgetful that the overlong tail of a thousand such words 
 had already been lopped off, or perhaps had never grown 
 out. In some countries the sheeps' tails are so long that' 
 they hitch a tiny wagon to each animal, so that it hauls its 
 caudal extremity instead of dragging it on the ground. 
 Now the difference between these sheep and our medical 
 Bo Peep tf/-pacas, is that the words grow no valuable wool 
 on their tails, and that we trawl them on the ground 
 behind us as the ladies do their dress-trails. Sheep and 
 words and ladies are alike in the one important respect 
 that, in the poet's immortal lines, we let them alone and
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 49 
 
 they surely come home, dragging their tails (and much 
 else also) behind them. 
 
 To my genial critic who wished his words and sheep (his 
 ladies, too, I wonder ?) to have tails and trails twice too 
 long, I sent the following skit, to illustrate the already 
 recognized fact of the redundancy of many word-tails, 
 and to suggest that we either retail all the short-tailed 
 curs, or that we curtail all the long-tailed puppies. Either 
 one thing or the other ; if you refuse to say chemic and 
 theoretic, then you must not say scientific and hydrochloric. 
 If you make us say chemical and theoretical, then, like a 
 sucking dove we will roar you for consistency and ask 
 that you be scientifical, or else we will prescribe nitrical 
 and hydrochlorical acid for your alarming gastrical torpor 
 and obstinacy. My strabismic letter to my friend was as 
 follows : 
 
 Some Scientifical Difficulties. The patient was at the 
 Polyclinical Hospital a very sick woman ; she was ascitical and 
 cyanotical ; she had an anemical (dicrotical or anacrotical) 
 murmur; splanchnical and splenical dulness was pronounced. 
 Neither the allopathical nor the homeopathical consultants could 
 determine whether the affection was of extrinsical or intrinsical 
 origin, whether anabolical, katabolical, atrophical, septicemical, 
 lithemical, luetical, hemical, hemolytical, thermical, tabetical, 
 hepatical, or encephalical. The specialists were called in, and 
 laryngoscopical, ophthalmoscopical, gynecological and otoscop- 
 ical examinations were made. The laryngoscopical man said a 
 diphtheritical membrane was forming, and the phrenical nerve 
 was pressed upon. The next averred the difficulty was eso- 
 phorical or exophorical, that a blennorrhagical inflammation, 
 perhaps a rheumatical iritis existed. After an endoscopical ex- 
 amination the gynecological expert said pelvical (or pubical) 
 disorder was present and a bad cystical and chorionical state of 
 affairs. The ear-man claimed that the disease was specifical, 
 that the otical ganglion was syphilitical and its condition 
 5
 
 50 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 pathognomonical. The diagnostical and prognostical difficulties 
 were certes becoming most prolifical ! 
 
 As to therapeutical measures, one advised cardiacal and tonical 
 treatment, another hypodermical ; one thought hydriatical 
 methods good, another antiphlogistical, while still another sug- 
 gested hypnotical and soporifical agents. Galvanical and 
 faradical electricity, as well as statical and franklinical, were 
 advised. The surgeon after a diagnostical incision (under 
 anesthetical precautions) spoke of a plastical operation. Caus- 
 tical applications to the throat were considered good, and the 
 exhibition of prussical, or of borical, nitrical and hydrochlorical 
 acids, perhaps also carbolical with malical and acetical acid 
 drinks. The general physician thought antineuralgical and 
 antirheumatical prescriptions sufficient, but the obstetrician 
 would have added oxytocical ones. 
 
 The patient died of a/-coholical paretical dementia, super- 
 induced, it is thought, by despair at the orthographical and 
 phonetical conservatism of progressive Americans. 
 
 To make short work of it, the essence of the matter 
 concerning -ic and -ical is this : Both of the suffixes, -ic 
 and -ical are terminals, the significance of which is to give 
 an adjectival meaning to a word. To add them both to 
 one word is to contend that dogs and sheep should either 
 have two tails, or that one tail should be twice as long as 
 normal. If the suffix, -ic, gives the adjectival meaning, 
 why add a second ? The French, from whom we get 
 many of the -ic terminations find it unnecessary to add an 
 -al. If a word is an adjective can you make it more so by 
 tautologic caudalizations ? (There are a few words whose 
 stems end in -ic such as vesical, clinical, logical, finical, etc., 
 and these require the -al to make them adjectives, but these 
 are provings of the rule, and the query why you don't say 
 vesic, logic, and clinic, is the prompting of thoughtlessness. 
 I would not object however, in the least, to clipping these 
 also.) If a word needs two adjectival tails why should we not
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 51 
 
 say bestialic, linealic, etc. ? If these were admitted of course 
 the -al lovers would have to add their pet to the word, and 
 we should have bestialical, linealical, etc., each sheep 
 would then require two toy-wagons. This reminds one of 
 the wonderful word, pockethandkerchief. The primary 
 good word was kerchief, a head-covering. We now call a 
 piece of lace or linen a pocket-hand-head-covering : I am 
 not unmindful of the hyperfinical distinction that some 
 hyperfinical folk have sought to establish as regards -ic and 
 -ical, -ac, and -acal, that the -ics and -acs denote primary 
 objective attributes of or pertaining to the things, whilst 
 the -icals and the -acals denote secondary qualities of the 
 nature of or connected with the attribute in -ic or -ac, i. e., 
 more remotely and subjectively relating to the thing. For 
 example, a cardiac valve, the cardiacal qualities of a drug ; 
 a historic answer ; a historical treatise ; a comic paper ; a 
 comical idea. But this contention is impossible of realiza- 
 tion, i. Because hundreds of words by custom have 
 become absolutely limited to either form singly and alone ; 
 2. Because not even the best writers observe the distinc- 
 tion ; 3. It is altogether too fine a distinction to be made 
 by the ordinary workaday humanity ; 4. It would not 
 satisfy the -^/ophites, who want the -al on the end of some 
 of their words, without question, forever, and ever, world 
 without end, Amen ! Think of saying Arabtcal, Teutonical, 
 Celtical, etc. ! We should of course have to adopt bestialic 
 and bestialical (or bestic and bestical), clinic and clinical, 
 syphilitic and syphilitical, and so on to the end. It is quite 
 plain this system-mongering and analogy-craze leads us 
 into sorry plights. In fact, it should be apparent upon a 
 minute's reflection that in a language so utterly composite, 
 illogical and non-systemic as ours, the argument from or 
 for analogy is absurdity itself. In one respect this is an 
 advantage, because when we can succeed in battering 
 down the dead wall of ancient prejudice, and explode the
 
 52 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 arsenal of etymological spelling, then we may bring some 
 order and sanity in the rebellious mob of English words. 
 
 Of one thing we may rest assured : All the tory immo- 
 bility of all the world cannot prevent change. It is as useless 
 to attempt it as to try to stop the rising tide, or to stay the 
 resistless and silent forces of evolution itself. It is the part 
 of wisdom to guide evolution, not to fight it to the death, 
 to guide language-evolution in the interests of brevity 
 and perspicacity, not to cling irrationally to the old ways 
 which clear vision may clearly see are doomed. The 
 language of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare, as shown in 
 the original forms, is an utterly different language from that 
 we speak to-day. The ordinary American, if he could hear 
 Chaucer speaking, or if he could listen to a phonographic 
 repetition of his actual speech, could not understand a 
 sentence, hardly a word of it. The printed form cannot 
 bind the ever-fluctuating pronunciation. The province or 
 function of the printed (or written) word is to stand as a 
 symbol or visible analogue of the spoken word. Etymol- 
 ogy to the dogs ! Printing makes certain a record of the 
 etymology, but to seek to clog the word itself with it is 
 the worst of delusions. Our duty scientifically, socio- 
 logically, and philologically is to keep the printed form 
 plastic. The crystallized language is a dead language, 
 and when there is no plasticity of language there is none 
 of the minds and civilization of those who speak that 
 language. There is a subtle, but all-powerful reaction and 
 retroaction of language upon mind. Men progressive in 
 science and sociology must be progressive in language and 
 the use of language. Prick a German word and it bleeds. 
 There is the pulsing heart of meaning behind it, flooding 
 it with sanguine significance. French words, and the 
 Greek-derived or Latin-derived words of our own tongue 
 are as bloodless, dead and meaningless as are to us Chinese 
 pictographs. The comparison of the large, plastic, ener-
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 53 
 
 getic, capable German with the narrow, crystalline, station- 
 ary, incapable Frenchman must at once spring into view, 
 and the prophecy is clear as to which one is to inherit the 
 future. The French birth-rate is about equal to the death- 
 rate ; that of the Teuton is far in excess. Do you believe 
 in progressive Teutonism, and Anglo-Saxonism, or in 
 reactionism, toryism, and ultramontism ? Choose your 
 partners, gentlemen. Your choice in so little a matter as 
 the use of words will tell the plain story of mental bias, 
 quite as well as the choice of religion or of political party. 
 Specifically, the microscopic modifications I have urged 
 here are as follows : 
 
 1. Abolish in English words the archaic, unnecessary, 
 bothersome ce and oe, supplanting it by e. 
 
 2. Cease adding the tautologic -al to adjectives having 
 already one adjectival suffix, -ic. It is already done in 
 thousands of words ; finish the job. 
 
 3. Drop the useless hyphen in words whose parts are 
 derived from classic languages. In ten thousand words 
 you have already done so ; finish with the rest. But retain 
 the hyphen in such compound terms as express a single 
 idea by two semifused English words, especially when both 
 are nouns. E. g., say antitoxin (not anti-toxin), culdesac, 
 (not cul-de-sac), postmortem, (not post-mortem) ventrofixa- 
 tion, (not ventro-fixation), etc. Keep the hyphen, because 
 it is necessary to avoid confusion and doubtfulness of mean- 
 ing, in curet-spoon, heart-murmur, skin-disease, sleeping- 
 sickness, etc. 
 
 4. Drop the useless -te from curet, brunet,fourchet, etiquet, 
 cigaret, etc. You have already lopped it off from cutlet, 
 doublet, quartet, quintet, sextet, septet, racket, minuet, fillet, 
 corset, stylet, tourniquet, bouquet, etc. Finish the job. 
 
 In the same way cut off the useless -me from many words, 
 writing program, gram, centigram, etc., j ust as already we do 
 telegram, anagram, diagram, epigram; let's make an end of it.
 
 54 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 5. Use figures instead of spelling out numbers, at least 
 those above ten. 
 
 6. Anglicise foreign terms when a goodly proportion of 
 your readers will not understand them in the originals. 
 Use italics as little as possible ; use as few foreign words 
 and terms as possible, because the vast majority of your 
 audience cannot understand them (even if you do) : and 
 because there's a deal of silly conceit in airing exotics of 
 speech. 
 
 7. As to the spelling of chemic terms, accept the recom- 
 mendations of the American Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science, which after years of dispassionate investi- 
 gation advised that we drop the final e in bromid, iodid, etc., 
 and in bromin, iodin, atropin, quinin, etc. Say phenol instead 
 of carbolic acid, glycerol instead of glycerin, etc. 
 
 8. Abolish all diereses and accents. They cannot teach 
 pronunciation, and they are useless luggage. Let us write 
 oophorectomy , cooperation, ptomain, leucomain, etc., without 
 the diereses. When a foreign word is Anglicised let us 
 do it completely, and not drag over into our domain the 
 exotics of foreign habit, leaving it, e. g., neither English nor 
 French. Leave to the poets the acute, the grave, and the 
 circumflex accents, that are foreign to the spirit of our own 
 tongue. 
 
 9. Do not bother about hybrid terms. A mule is a 
 better animal than either its father or its mother. It is only 
 finicky sticklers that are horrified by hybrid words. There 
 are many, many thousands of them in our language, good 
 words too, that have been used for centuries, and that 
 always will be used. There is no earthly objection to 
 them, and indeed we should rather welcome them if they 
 are good words, expressive and short. More than any 
 other language ours is adapted to receive them and use 
 them, and there are more of them in it than in any other 
 language. Instead of being ashamed of the fact we should
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 55 
 
 be proud of it, as it shows our receptivity and plasticity. 
 If we are bound to have the defects of our virtues, let us 
 not be ashamed of the virtues of our defects. 
 
 Finally, I would beg that you carefully consider the 
 source and secret reasons that exist for opposition to the 
 foregoing recommendations. Ignorance, colossal, imper- 
 turbable, impertinent ignorance is characteristic of much 
 of it. Read, for example, the letters in the British Medical 
 Journal from correspondents (not editorial utterances, be- 
 cause the editors know better, and have publicly advised 
 dropping <z and d), and you will see these objectors havn't 
 studied philology five minutes in their lives, and are living 
 in an antediluvian world. 
 
 But, again consider the source, I beg of you, and you 
 will very often find that it is the secret influence of the 
 commercial medical publisher that is at work. He pub- 
 lishes a dictionary committed to the old ways, and hence 
 prints his medical journals and books in the archaic lan- 
 guage of his dictionary. It means expense and loss of 
 money to him in very many ways to have his " authorities " 
 supplanted. The astute editor of the Journal of the Ameri- 
 can Medical Association has caught this aspect of the matter, 
 and an editorial in one of the issues of Jan uary, 1 896, happily 
 sets it forth. It becomes an important concern of the pro- 
 fession whether it has any scientific and literary rights, and 
 if it shall govern itself or be governed by its publishing 
 servants, very accommodating editors, and self-interest 
 generally. What an instructive fact it is to see a journal 
 that has once been taught how to spell go back under the 
 domination of commercialism to the " flesh-pots of Egypt." 
 In this connection it is worthy of note that the two con- 
 siderable journals of the United States not controlled by 
 the commercial publisher, the Boston Medical and Surgical 
 Journal (representing the best literary and scientific culture 
 of the eastern states) and the Journal of the Association,
 
 56 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 (representing also the enterprise and freedom of the western 
 and of all states) have long ago adopted and do now use 
 the more progressive methods of spelling. The same 
 practice on the part of many other reputable journals, and 
 the unanimous acceptance of it by the American Medical 
 Editor's Association three years ago,* these and more, 
 
 * From The Medical News, June 17, 1893, I reproduce from the paper 
 read at the meeting of the American Medical Editors' Association in Mil- 
 waukee, June 5, 1893, the following sentences : 
 
 1. Of all the languages of the civilized world there is none that in the 
 most distant manner can rival the English in the ludicrous illogicality and 
 wretched lawlessness of its orthography. In other languages there is a 
 manifest philologic sanity that evidently seeks to hold the written (or printed) 
 word in some sort of relationship with the spoken word. But in our language 
 the reverse seems to be the case ; the more methods in which a single sound 
 can be spelled the better it seemed to please the fathers of the language. 
 As Professor Lounsbury says : " There is nothing more contemptible than 
 our present spelling, unless it be the reasons usually given for clinging to it." 
 
 2. The labor which this fact imposes upon the child's mind, and upon all 
 minds that, so far as language- learning goes, persist in the prepubertic stage, 
 is a labor that conceived in its entirety is literally appalling. The German 
 child learns in one year, and well, what the English child learns in three, 
 and poorly. -f It is so tremendous a labor that even few educated men reach 
 unconsciousness and ease of orthography, and for the great mass of people 
 it is a constant source of worry or chagrin. To a vast number of people the 
 secret consciousness of their orthographic failing keeps them from the pleasure 
 of writing and composition, or prevents them from profitable employment. 
 To every person that writes, the excess of labor required by our barbaric 
 spelling is a huge waste of time and a heightener of the friction of life. 
 With the correlated barbarism of pronunciation, it is the greatest obstacle to 
 the spread of English as the world's great, sole tongue. 
 
 3. The foregoing facts are so incontrovertible that no one who has even 
 cursorily looked into philology and pedagogics has any tendency to deny 
 them. Equally certain is it that all of our great students and masters of 
 philology are entirely agreed as to the tremendous importance of lessening 
 the burdensome labor of education, and the friction of life, by some approach, 
 
 f Professor March says that " it has been computed that we throw away 
 $15,000,000 a year paying teachers for addling the brains of our children 
 with bad spelling, and at least $100,000,000 more paying printers and pub- 
 lishers for sprinkling our books and papers with silent letters."
 
 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 57 
 
 are most encouraging proofs of our freedom from prejudice 
 and dogmatism, and that we are alive to the demands of 
 literary as well as scientific progress. The suggestion need 
 hardly be added that as without payment we give our arti- 
 cles, the product of our laborious lives and of our devo- 
 tion, to nonmedical men, out of which they make fortunes, 
 
 great or little, toward the phonetic spelling of English words. As succinctly 
 stated in his preface by the learned editor of the great Century Dictionary : 
 " The language is struggling toward a more consistent and phonetic spelling, 
 and it is proper in disputed and doubtful cases to cast the influence of the 
 dictionary in favor of this movement, both by its own usage in the body 
 of the text, and at the head of articles by the order of forms, or the selection 
 of the form under which the word shall be treated." 
 
 Never has more capital been invested in similar enterprises, and never has 
 more philologic erudition been gathered to the service than in the editing 
 and publishing of those splendid lexicographic monuments of American 
 scholarship, the New Webster, the Century, and the Standard dictionaries. 
 It is equally true that in each case the most earnest desire of the men in 
 charge of these works has been to go to the furthest admissible limit dared 
 in recommending the shortening and rationalizing of the spelling of English 
 words. They have only stopped when and where they thought further 
 advance would result in a baulking, and a refusal of the people to follow. 
 
 Words fail me to express my amazement to hear men object to all change 
 in the customary spelling. To be sure, they are but few, and those who have 
 never given the matter an hour's thought or study, who thus blindly cling to 
 the fetich of custom, stolidly resisting any change whatsoever. The changes 
 that have been made, and that have become the rule these they willingly 
 accept. They have grown used to spelling music and public without a final k, 
 and are willing to leave off this useless second tail. (The English even now 
 stick to the final k in almanac.) But their mental forefathers as stoutly 
 resisted the curtailing process, and their similarly-minded children will finally 
 accept the changes that progressive minds are now forcing on their fathers. 
 The stupidest, most disgusting thing in the world, is the brute conservatism 
 that refuses all change, good or not good, from stolid, unreasoning desire 
 for things as they are. Better chorea, ay, better epilepsy than absolute 
 paralysis. Conservatism is the sham coyness of linguistic old-maidism, the 
 crinolin fig-leaf of philologic prudery, a fig-leaf, too, not the result of too 
 much, but of too little knowledge indeed, of an abysmal ignorance of the 
 history of the language. 
 
 And most strange of all is such a dead-blank wall of prejudice on the part 
 of medical men. Their science is a progressive onej their life is harassed 
 6
 
 58 CONCERNING MEDICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 it hardly becomes them to dictate to us as to literary and 
 scientific matters. If you contribute to these journals you 
 have a perfect right to demand that your ideas of language 
 shall be followed in their printing. Accompany your arti- 
 cle or book with the condition that your choice of spelling- 
 methods, etc., be carried out. 
 
 and hurried with the crush of duties and opportunities. Every hour's experi- 
 ence teaches them to ignore precedent and to cut by the shortest route to the 
 desired end. No body of men is more hampered, and in no calling is labor 
 so much thwarted as in theirs, by popular inherited prejudices, and the old 
 unsloughed snake-skins of quackery, of myth, and of mummery. 
 
 The vast majority of medical words have not grown out of the old 
 languages, either of the ancient living Greek or of the medievally preserved 
 dead Greek. When a word is desired the modern minter snaps out his 
 Liddell and Scott, gets some words that best suit his purpose, and shakes 
 them together in his etymologic basket until they cohere into some sort of 
 unity, not infrequently a very ludicrous one. 
 
 The argument most relied on by the obstructionists is the etymologic one. 
 But even this poor scarecrow cannot be set up in our medical cornfields. 
 I do not think the etymologic argument of much force, even in the general 
 literary language, because already the form in a large portion of our words is 
 altogether misleading, changed, or lost, and because the vast majority of 
 people will and can never know anything of the etymologic rootings of their 
 language. But, far more important still is the fact that with printing came 
 the impossibility of a coinage ever being lost, its history unrecorded, or its 
 tiniest rootlet unpreserved. 
 
 But far and away over all is the fact that the needs and the help of the 
 living millions of bodies and minds present and to come outweigh linguistic 
 and philologic considerations. Language was made for man, not man for 
 language. 
 
 Moreover, and this note well, despite all the literary coxcombs and philo- 
 logic old maids of Christendom, reform is inevitable. The people, with 
 unerring instinct, are determined to mold their language into some better 
 conformity to their needs. Slang is riotously rampant, and slang is language 
 in the making. Some reform in spelling is as certain to come as future men 
 and women are certain to come, and wisdom on our part is to accept the 
 inevitable, and to make that inevitable as sensible as we can. As another has 
 said : " The grammarian, the purist, the pernicketty stickler for trifles is the 
 deadly foe of good English, rich in idioms and racy of the soil."
 
 THE ROLE OF MATERNAL LOVE IN OR- 
 GANIC EVOLUTION.* 
 
 In his address before the British Association Lord Salis- 
 bury recapitulated the three great mysteries to the solution 
 of which science has in vain directed her attention. The 
 origins of atoms, of ether, and of life, are to-day the most 
 utter mysteries. To account for them no human mind has 
 framed even- the faintest concept worthy of consideration. 
 We have only the merest hints of the possibility of explana- 
 tion of gravitation ; concerning electricity we are getting 
 only a little better idea ; but as to physiologic chemistry 
 our little knowledge serves only to make our great ignor- 
 ance more frightful. All origins of things are shrouded in 
 impenetrable mystery, and our philosophies are but weak 
 and sorry attempts to widen the light a wee little bit about 
 us. No philosophy and no religion explains finalities, and 
 all efforts end only in resolving many lesser mysteries into 
 fewer great mysteries. The conception of Biologos, incom- 
 ing light and love, entering inorganic worlds and matter as 
 a great incarnation-principle and spiritualizing force, electri- 
 fies and quickens the mental, imaginative, and moral man 
 as none other ; but, of course, it too ends only in a little 
 broadening of the light-way about our darkness-encircled 
 lives. 
 
 But it seems to me that so far as concerns the individual 
 manifestations of life, we may and we must differentiate 
 clearly between the love of one's own life and the love of 
 
 * Read before the Wistar Biological Association, Philadelphia, Dec. 14, 
 1894; The Philadelphia Association of Kindergartners, April 7, 1896, etc. 
 
 59
 
 60 f MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 the life of one's descendants. The cuckoo bird has not 
 enough strength of the maternal instinct to build a nest and 
 incubate her own eggs. In pigeons the male has a far 
 stronger maternal instinct than the female, and in some 
 other birds the male has resolutely to fight for and defend 
 the eggs from the destructive habits of the female. Some 
 animals will expose themselves to danger, even die most 
 heroically in defending their young, whilst the kangaroo 
 mother, it is said, will, when hotly pursued, drop one or 
 more of her little ones to lighten her load. In human life, 
 also, as we well know, some people care little for children, 
 even for those of their own flesh and blood, whilst others 
 will sacrifice their own lives with most pathetic heroism for 
 the education and up-bringing of their young. 
 
 It therefore appears to me plain that we should distinguish 
 sharply between self-love and child-love. Fundamentally, 
 I doubt not, they proceed from one ultimate unity, but in 
 biologic manifestation they may be considered as two dis- 
 tinct exhibitions or phases of the life-force. One is devoted 
 to the saving of the individual life, the other to the per- 
 petuation of life in new individuals. It is perhaps easy to 
 recognize the one as a blind, purposeless force, but the in- 
 coming of maternal love is not thus to be accounted for. 
 
 I have been forced to use the term maternal love in 
 default of a better one to express an unnamed fact or 
 generalization of facts much larger than that of simple 
 maternity. In many animals we find the father taking 
 upon himself many of the duties usually fulfilled by the 
 mother, and at all times the purposes and results of the 
 genesial instinct are carried out by an intrinsically-inter- 
 woven and correspondent series of duties of both parents. 
 Moreover, if we descend to the vegetable world the eye 
 that is trained to observe facts rather than the accepted 
 wordings and ideas of facts, sees everywhere that the phe- 
 nomena of reproduction, whether in anemophilous, ento-
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 61 
 
 mophilous, or cryptogamic orders, are really asexual, and 
 the plants or trees themselves have no fundamental mor- 
 phologic differences of structure due to sexualism. Indeed, 
 the so-called " male " and " female " organs are often pro- 
 duced by the same plant, and even by the same twig and 
 the same flower. 
 
 I have racked my brain to find or invent a term that 
 should indicate the large biologic instinct that prepares the 
 organs for reproduction, that begets, and that cares for the 
 new being after it is begotten, whether it be in the plant, 
 the animal, or the human world. We have observation of 
 a profound and unitary force that directly or indirectly 
 dominates all organic life during almost every hour of 
 adult existence. In the plant-world every function per- 
 tains to or ends in seed-production, and just as a father 
 horn-bill bird reduces himself to a skeleton and utter ex- 
 haustion in getting and carrying food to his mate and 
 nestlings, just as a human parent wears life out in heroic 
 sacrifice for beloved children, just exactly so will a tree 
 under like disadvantageous conditions of nutriment com- 
 mit suicide in the production of seeds. An Indian mother, 
 in order to rescue her baby a few feet away, crawls from 
 behind the rock protecting her from the guns of United 
 States soldiers. She knows the act may bring a bullet in 
 her brain, but she saves the baby and dies. A hen in a 
 burning barn gathers her chickens beneath her and is 
 burned to a statuesque cinder, but the singed chicks are 
 saved by the dead mother-body. Is it not the same divine 
 love that filled both hearts ? Is there anything else in the 
 world like that that unites and holds in one all living 
 things ? I pity one who does not see in such things the 
 living God instantly present and profoundly interested in 
 carrying on his biologic world. 
 
 There is one silent, subtle, palpitant pang and power 
 of love that thrills through all organic life, that murmurs
 
 62 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 in all living things, and swells and sings its unheard song 
 in the inmost hearts of grass, rose, or tree ; of cow, tiger, 
 or bird ; of man, maid, or mother, all straining eye and 
 hope toward the renewed young world to come. It is this 
 great supernatural force for which I would find a name 
 applicable to all kinds of life and all phases of its function. 
 In its purest and sweetest quality it is mother-love, and so 
 in order to give it a naming we may call it that. But I 
 would wish that the connotation may not be forgotten that 
 it is also father-love as well, and that it is one and identical 
 with that beautiful power that makes the pigeon turn the 
 eggs upon which she sits, that makes the grass bloom, and 
 the bee to seek the bloom. 
 
 Possibly some of the more " scientific " of you were a 
 little startled when I used the word " supernatural." It 
 has been quite the fashion among a certain class of good 
 folk to think that anything named scientific must not have 
 aught to do with such foolish old used-up words. Indeed, 
 it is supposed that science is wholly given to explaining 
 things by the agency of physical strains and stresses, by 
 reactions and reflexes, mechanic laws and natural selections, 
 struggles for existence, and all that. It positively makes 
 some people purple with rage if one dares to suggest that 
 there may be such a thing as "vital force," or " soul," and 
 a hint as to the possible existence of divinity, either in 
 man or above him, elicits a pitying contempt of you that 
 freezes the very circumambient air. Well, well ! These 
 are very wise people indeed, but the birds will sing and 
 build nests after these brethren are gone to their agnostic 
 heaven. Even they have their uses in a world of incon- 
 gruous and changeful conditions ! 
 
 Science, I take it, is, chiefest of all things, the unpreju- 
 diced, open-eyed observation and systematization of facts ; 
 the construction to be put upon them, the meaning of facts, 
 is another matter, and differs somewhat according to the
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 63 
 
 person who philosophizes. Facts are very patient, un- 
 complaining things ; very pliant and compliant, at least for 
 a time ; they bear a deal of strange philosophizing over and 
 about them, very meekly. Some people have been known 
 to ignore them entirely, and yet the patient facts did not 
 worry or stop existing. And those who thus falsely con- 
 strue, or who thus ignore, are quite happy also. All things 
 have their compensations, and it would be a great pity if 
 dogmatism and atheism were denied the compensation at 
 least of self-satisfaction. 
 
 The criticism of much that passes under the name of 
 science, and the fault of many so-called scientists, is the 
 lack of sympathy. It is only a keen sense of love, inter- 
 est, and fellow-feeling, that gives that alert use of the 
 imagination that leads to a knowledge of the truth. The 
 collator of facts with the light only of cold reason and 
 intellect will never find lots of facts in the world. 
 
 It begins slowly to break, even upon the most dry-as- 
 dust scientist, that there are some things not dreamed 
 of in the evolution-philosophy, and the suggestion may 
 not bring danger to the suggester that the fight to 
 death for the supremacy of the deer herd is not an un- 
 qualified necessity from the axioms of the " struggle for 
 existence," nor from the "law of the reaction of the organ- 
 ism to the environment." If the " environment " of 
 maidenly beauty in Juliet begets "the reaction" in 
 Romeo's fancy of springtime love, whence, it may be asked, 
 whence Julia and her beauty ? Or, to put the question in 
 another form : Does not the stupidest intelligence catch 
 hint from the universality, the self-sacrifice, and the power 
 of the maternal instinct in every living organism, weed, 
 insect, or human, that there is purpose and significance 
 poured down into these beings from above, not growing 
 out of them from any need or logic of present circumstance, 
 or from any demands of their organisms, considered as
 
 64 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 single and self-sufficient mechanisms ? Does the " environ- 
 ment," or any so-called " law," or any so-called explanation 
 of science, show why these billions of ever renascent beings 
 should spend every energy of their lives in producing and 
 caring for new beings to take their places ? Why should 
 we, animals and men, care a fig whether our places are 
 taken or not? The sexual and maternal instinct holds 
 masterly reign and control of the soul of every biologic 
 thing, and gives the instant and incontrovertible lie to the 
 libellous chatter that all is selfishness, all is mechanic, 
 adamantine law and purposeless change in our life below. 
 Without the supernatant ocean of divine life and love behind 
 it, the miraculous tide of maternal love could not infill 
 and inthrill the tendrils and hearts of all living things, any 
 more than, on a thousand miles of shore without the 
 throbbing gush of ocean-tide, would a million little bays 
 and inlets be filled and bathed with flashing wave and 
 liquid life. When not thus full-flooded with the tide of 
 love, the little empty estuaries of our individual lives are 
 occupied in panting for its future coming, in mourning that 
 it does not come, or in pensive memories of its past 
 blessedness. 
 
 But possibly the hard-eyed is disgustedly muttering that 
 this is all poetry and nonsense. Give us, he is probably 
 saying, give us something scientific, something about 
 "nature red with tooth and claw;" about bones; about 
 protoplasm ; dying planets ; the pump-like action of the 
 heart ; and reflexes, and natural selection, and the survival 
 of the fittest. And to the hard-eyed I might make answer 
 that the truth of poetry is truer than the truth of science ; 
 that teeth and claws are very beautiful structures and serve 
 glorious purposes ; that bones were made by Biologos, and 
 when dead are excellent objects of study for the hard-eyed 
 ones ; that none of us know anything about protoplasm 
 except that it is living and mysterious ; that neither of us
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 65 
 
 know anything about dead planets ; that natural selection 
 is half-lie, half-truth, and that the survival of the " unfit " is 
 a wonderful fact. 
 
 In all seriousness, and with the most sober scientific reso- 
 lution, I contend that among the philosophies and sciences 
 of the universe, whether idealistic or materialistic, the role 
 of maternal love is either unrecognized entirely, or held in 
 too light estimation. The term, " struggle for existence," 
 for example, has been much talked about, and has been 
 supposed to be the fundamental explanation of the phe- 
 nomena of organic life, and, with natural selection, to fur- 
 nish the solution of the riddles of organic evolution. But 
 in most prosaic literalness, can any one not see that the 
 distinguishing and determining characteristics, both in mor- 
 phology and physiology have been more dominated by the 
 instant and ceaseless influence of the instincts pertaining to 
 reproduction ? Can any one doubt that the progress of 
 evolution, that the possibility and actuality of civilization 
 have been instigated by the upworking and the outworking 
 of the sexual passion, and the desire to find houses and 
 food and place for the little ones? It is maternal love 
 alone that has produced all the ideals and actualities of 
 Beauty and Esthetics that we have ; and so art, novel, 
 drama, society, and ambition are the creations of this 
 mysterious power. 
 
 In the plant-world every phase of form or function ex- 
 ists as a product of the strain toward inflorescence and 
 seed-production. The trunks of the forest monarchs are 
 the props of the flower to raise it high in air where the 
 sun may reach and ripen, and where the winds may catch 
 the pollen and carry it to waiting mates. Every form of 
 leaf, every shape of growth, every coloration and build of 
 flower pertain to the one end and aim of existence. Think 
 of the inexhaustible ingenuity, the millionfold device for 
 scattering seeds. Every sort of balloon conceivable has
 
 66 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 been made by the cunning mother-trees for wafting their 
 babes to far-away nourishing resting-places. My friend, 
 Lafcadio Hearn, tells me of the ceiba tree in the West 
 Indies, which bursting its pod like a gun, floats its white- 
 winged seeds like a snow-storm over a city, and when they 
 settle, quickly must the natives clear every one off the 
 roofs, for if a single one lodges it will wreck and crush the 
 house with its prolific roots. The natives think the tree 
 has personality, like animals or men, and if you wish one 
 of the trees cut down you must make your wood-cutter 
 drunk in order to get him to do it. 
 
 Some of these tree-mothers surround their little ones 
 with such impervious shells that they float and drift with 
 tides and currents for weeks and months, and yet retain 
 their life and growth-power till washed ashore. There are 
 hairs, spines, and hard shells to protect; acid juices and 
 poisons to sting and harrow; husks and hooks and spears 
 to cut and hurt; and a thousandfold devices for getting 
 the better of the curious or the hungry. Some make 
 hooks and claws that catch any passing animal, and who, 
 most tormented, as all boys and dogs well know, must 
 carry them far and wide. But the birds, too, are great 
 helpers. Darwin found that a clump of dried mud weigh- 
 ing nine grains, from the leg of a partridge, and which had 
 been kept for three years, contained seeds from which he 
 raised eighty-two distinct plants. Especially in eating the 
 seeds for the sake of the fruit, the seeds preserving their 
 vitality, the birds, as also animals, are great helpers in the 
 distribution of the flora of the world. If you think that in 
 nest-building a swallow probably travels about 400 miles 
 a day, and in migration (also for love's sake) birds travel 
 straight away from 500 to IOOO miles a day, we see how 
 great must have been the influence of birds in plant-distri- 
 bution. A curious and purely accidental function of the 
 birds is the chance stocking of lakes and rivers above high
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. .67 
 
 falls with fish, which, caught below, escape from claws or 
 bill as the birds seek their nests, and dropping into these 
 high, remote waters, people them with their kind ; the life 
 within and about the water in such localities is often thus 
 entirely readjusted. 
 
 But I wish to call attention to a fact, our familiarity with 
 which leads, as usual, to a forgetfulness of its far-reaching 
 importance and significance. There are few people, even 
 those who know better, who do not mistake a seed's stored- 
 up supply for the seed itself. The seed may or may not 
 be nutritious, but even if it is so, the true seed constitutes 
 the infinitesimal part of what we roughly call the seed. 
 The great bulk of every grain or seed is composed of a 
 stored-up stock of concentrated nutriment clustered about 
 the true seed, and upon which it feeds whilst springing its 
 rootlets downward and its leaflets upward. Thus the 
 bread, the potato, the apple we eat, is the food that has 
 been cunningly prepared by the mother-plant for its off- 
 spring to use whilst it is getting its own organs of food- 
 supply ready for their work. The yolk-sac of the fish or 
 the egg of the bird is exactly the same sort of a contriv- 
 ance. 
 
 But a remarkable deduction is to be made from all this, 
 a deduction that is perfectly evident when we think of it 
 and realize it, but it is a deduction that many of us seldom 
 or never make. It is this : It is of course, self-evident, that 
 the entire animal world, including the human, is wholly 
 dependent upon the vegetable for food, and for the means 
 of continuing its existence. Without the nutrient material 
 furnished by the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom 
 would at once die of starvation. But now consider well 
 the implication of the fact, that it is entirely by means of 
 nutriment stored up by plants to nourish their young, that, 
 as it were, stolen by the animal world enables it to live. 
 In other words, it is that great cosmic, regenerative force,
 
 68 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 biologic maternal love, that has been ingenious enough to 
 manufacture concentrated food with the necessary " keep- 
 ing" qualities, and capable of supporting the life of plants 
 and of animals. Their food is our food ; what nourishes the 
 vegetable children nourishes the animal children. (Thus 
 we understand, in passing, why chloroform and other drugs 
 affect plants exactly as they affect us.) Driven by the spur 
 of solicitousness and love for its young, the plant has found 
 out the great secret of food-formation. In this connection 
 is it necessary to add a word as to the food of man derived 
 from the animal ? The flesh of animals is derived directly 
 from grass and fruits and seeds, and this muscular tissue is 
 thus itself the very product of the subtile, silent weaver of 
 life we have called maternal love. The most perfect foods 
 of man, milk and eggs, products of double distillation in 
 the cellular alembic of maternal life, this wonderful strained 
 white blood and living flesh, what can we say of these 
 works of the divine physiologic chemist? If we have 
 grateful hearts and seeing minds, we can only thank and 
 recognize the hand that fashioned and that reaches them 
 to us, as the hand of God, who keeps up the repeopling 
 of the world, and hence, who sees well to it that his little 
 ones should be fed. 
 
 Although perhaps logically, and you will say also rhe- 
 torically out of place, I cannot forbear at this point to 
 interject a word as to our care and treatment of hens and 
 cows. Please do not smile at the sudden transition. When 
 seen with the eyes of science, or with those of pure sym- 
 pathy, there is nothing about living things that is not beau- 
 tiful and winning and dignified. This great question of the 
 willing obedience, loyalty, and service of the animal world 
 to the human world, constantly arouses in sensitive hearts 
 a multitude of painful thoughts. From every prolific grain 
 or fruit, from dog and horse, especially from every maternal 
 organism there run back to the divine center reins of guid-
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 69 
 
 ance and control which ensure loyalty, obedience, and ser- 
 vice to a common " dim, far-off, unseen event." Else why 
 the continued giving of milk when the calf has gone, 
 why the continuous egg-production by the nonincubating 
 mother ? Animals are not so stupid as that ! Dairy- 
 folk well know the difficulty of getting cows to " give 
 down " when they are maltreated, when the food is not 
 good, or when deprived of their calves. Livingstone 
 speaks of the African cows as especially " bad " in this 
 respect, and that only " milk-fever " will compel them to 
 give their milk. The milkers in the Scottish highlands 
 used to have peculiar songs which made their cows 
 generous. The hen and the cow are the most loyal of 
 man's helpers and purveyors, and yet it is grievously 
 shocking how ungrateful we are to them. We are only 
 beginning to learn that our self-interest commands us to 
 care for cows better, but even now their suffering from 
 cold, the carelessness of farmers as to their food and water, 
 the filth in which they live, is a disgrace both to our selfish- 
 ness and to our humanity. If human mothers would only 
 think of what these other mothers endure and how they 
 are abused, there would be some hope that the milk given 
 human babes would soon be purer, freer from disease, and 
 yielded by a healthier and happier animal. It is known 
 that violent emotion poisons human milk, why also may 
 not the beatings and abuse of the cow change her milk 
 harmfully? Babies, human and canine, have died in con- 
 vulsions just after nursing when the mother had just been 
 furious with anger or emotion. It may be confidently 
 stated that, fed, housed and treated, as cows should be, and 
 the milk cared for as it should be, there would be little 
 enough profit to the dairyman if milk were furnished by 
 him at twenty cents a quart. But it will probably require 
 the scourges of tuberculosis and various diseases to teach 
 us the little lesson that the commonest human sympathy
 
 70 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 should long ago have taught. The same thought runs out 
 as regards our egg-supply. 
 
 Let me extend my parenthesis by a word or two of ad- 
 vice as to teaching children sympathy for and fellow-feel- 
 ing with animals. Enlist every child's interest in domestic 
 pets and make young naturalists of them as soon as possi- 
 ble. But guard against making them mere collectors of 
 dead animals. It is living not dead biology that quickens 
 the sensibilities and deepens the child's conception of the 
 world. Let him learn physiology rather than anatomy, 
 psychology rather than neurology. What is needed is the 
 lightning-like glance of intellectualized sympathy (at least 
 the sympathy) flashed among the play and functions and 
 relations of all palpitant life. Trained scientists are better 
 museum-makers than children. Don't let the child kill 
 and delude himself that that is science or biology. So 
 soon as a child understands anything it can understand the 
 pretty story of Mohammed cutting off the flaps of his coat 
 in order not to disturb his kitten sleeping upon it. The 
 animal child and the human child have a vast deal in 
 common. There is nothing humanity needs more than to 
 learn the duty of kindness and sympathy for all animal life. 
 Have a multiplicity of domestic pets. Let children almost 
 live in the Zoological Gardens. Beware of a person who 
 doesn't like animals ; something is deeply wrong with such 
 a person. There are a dozen or two books all children 
 should read as early as they can understand them. Such 
 are Oswald's Summerland and Zoological Sketches ; Mrs. 
 Martin's Life on an Ostrich Farm ; Nicols' Zoological Notes ; 
 Taylor's The Sagacity and Morality of Plants ; Olive Thorne 
 Miller's books, and those of Burroughs, perhaps ; Hudson's 
 splendid The Naturalist in La Plata ; Wilson's Studies in 
 Life and Sense ; and, above all, the great work of Kipling, 
 Beast and Man in India; and the great work of the greater 
 son, Rudyard, The Jungle Book, superb and beyond praise.
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 71 
 
 Let Lubbock and Romanes wait for older heads. It is a 
 strange family that do not think their cat and dog the most 
 remarkable and lovable cat and dog in the world. Every 
 pet will show animal spirit struggling toward the human, 
 dumbly begging for human sympathy and help ; and, too, 
 there frequently occur phenomena that make us shiver 
 as if we should look into the sky and see great divine eyes 
 beckoning ; facts that point to the unity of all life, infallible 
 signs of the dependence of the body upon spirit, soul and 
 sentiment penetrating sense and flesh like hidden elec- 
 tricity. The anesthetics we use in surgery paralyze plant- 
 metabolism and action, as, e.g., in the sensitive plant; and 
 snake poison retards the germination of seeds. A friend 
 of mine was kept awake nearly all night by some strange 
 noise at the window. A dead cuckoo told the story of an 
 endeavor to reach the supposed mate of the " cuckoo 
 clock." I went once a long distance to see a motherless 
 hen which had driven the old cat away and was brooding 
 over a lot of kittens, very watchful, very happy, and very 
 proud. Mrs. Martin tells a similar story of the great 
 Chakar playing the role of a most excellent foster-mother 
 to a half hundred tiny puff-balls of incubator chicks, 
 guarding, watching, careful not to put his great feet on 
 them, etc. A childless dog tried to steal some little 
 puppies, but failing, took a toy dog made of rubber and 
 tried to nurse it, licked and coddled it tenderly for a long 
 time. An English physician describes the mother-zeal of 
 a Maltese cat, a strict monogamist, faithful even in widow- 
 hood. But if any of the other cats had kittens she would 
 manage to get some of them, and in a few hours she had 
 an abundant supply of milk for them. The dependence of 
 this milk-secretion upon pure mother-love began in this 
 wise : At seven years of age she witnessed an accident to 
 a little kitten just weaned, to which she had previously had 
 a great aversion. This kitten fell, and hurting itself, cried
 
 72 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 piteously. At once dislike disappeared ; "Zettie" ran to 
 it, caressed it, and carried it upstairs. At this time she had 
 been a widow for fourteen months, but she now began 
 nursing the little orphan and continued to do so for two 
 months. I have elsewhere related an exactly similar fact, 
 except that it was a little dog, long childless, or puppyless 
 if you please, that nursed a lost kitten. Numerous instances 
 are on record of men having an ample milk-secretion and 
 nursing babes. Wagtails use the backs of friendly stronger 
 birds upon which they ride in long migrations. Elephants 
 and men are the only animals that shed tears in weeping. 
 Cows have been known to be so severely homesick that to 
 save their lives they had to be returned to the old home. 
 Dogs have returned home over 800 miles of unknown 
 country ; even when chloroformed it makes no difference 
 in their return. A crow with clipped wings left his thiev- 
 ing new master and walked four miles through the snow to 
 the old master. Dogs, monkeys, birds, and ducks have 
 been known to die of a "broken heart," from loss of young, 
 loss of their masters, etc. Ruskin tells the story of a race- 
 horse that took sick and only got well when his pet kitten 
 was telegraphed for and put in his stall. He then won the 
 race ! A mother monkey, the elder Kipling says, will 
 carry with her for weeks the dried and dead body of her 
 little one, fondling and petting it as if alive. It is said that 
 if the male bird of Paradise is killed the female will continue 
 to sit upon her eggs until she starves to death. 
 
 I have said that sympathy with the whole world of living 
 things is the prime requisite of learning truth. This is true 
 whether the truth be scientific, philosophic, or religious. 
 It is especially so with children. The recognition of the 
 maternal instinct in all other living things tells the young 
 the nature of the world in which we live more than all the 
 books and laboratories in the world. Take up the ques- 
 tion of the growth and relative degrees of intelligence in
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 73 
 
 animals. Guided by sympathy and a careful observation 
 of facts we can show the child clearly on what biologic 
 intelligence depends. Careful scrutiny shows that all vege- 
 tables and animals have an infinite wealth of what may be 
 called unconscious intelligence struggling for outlet. 
 Every living thing, in its form, color, and function, is a 
 palimpsest, behind the later bolder writing of which we see 
 dimly the deeper, richer characters and messages of a more 
 ancient truth. The intelligent energy that constitutes the 
 essential being of all things is the same in all, but is pre- 
 vented from coming to individual expression by the peculi- 
 arities of organization and the necessities of life. The 
 greater, the infinitely greater part of the intelligence of our 
 being, exists unconsciously, as cellular or physiologic in- 
 telligence. Out of this great mine of unconscious wisdom 
 we quarry rich gems of our individual, willed, or conscious 
 intelligence, and the progress of all personality as of all 
 civilization consists in adopting the intelligence of the 
 unconscious as that of our personal wills. The work of 
 all true life and evolution is to transform cellular or physio- 
 logic wisdom and morality into conscious willed intelli- 
 gence and morality. 
 
 Look sharply at the plant-world. Plants are prevented 
 from showing individual intelligence by the fact that they 
 have no powers of locomotion, and therefore do not need 
 a centralized nervous system that is the agent of bringing 
 cellular consciousness to personal consciousness. But they 
 choose, they show emotions, likes and dislikes, and they 
 have evident joys and sorrows. If you don't think so it is 
 not the fault of the plant. It sees more without eyes than 
 you do with them ! 
 
 In the animal world the conditions permitting the devel- 
 opment and showing of intelligence depend upon 
 
 i. The Sensitiveness and Amplitude of Sensitive 
 Surface Exposed to the External World. This is a 
 7
 
 74 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 great and beautiful law, a key that unlocks thousands of 
 mysteries for us. The interposition of hoofs between the 
 feet and the ground is the most noticeable illustration. 
 The hard hoof prevents knowledge of the ground, and the 
 perceptions are not sharpened. All hard-footed animals 
 are, as a rule, less intelligent than soft-footed animals. The 
 possession of other sharpened senses may help to compen- 
 sate, however. The mobile lip of the horse helps him, and 
 the knowledge of his own body gained by the sensitive tail 
 also aids, as well as his association with man. The hog's 
 nose and rooting propensities account for its relative intelli- 
 gence over the sheep and other hard-footed brothers. The 
 soft feet of birds is supplemented by the bill and the tongue, 
 and especially by the wings. The mobile lips of the dog, 
 his tongue, his expressive tail, together with his associa- 
 tion with man have aided his soft sensitive feet to develop 
 his intelligence greatly. The same may be said of the cat. 
 But, it is the trunk of the elephant, one of the most re- 
 markable physiologic structures in the world, that has 
 made this wonderful animal the most intelligent of all, 
 except the monkey, who has learned to use his front feet as 
 hands, and thus (the prehensile tail and mode of life aid- 
 ing), of all animals he has been put in the most intimate 
 connection with the world. 
 
 The second great condition of expression of animal in- 
 telligence relates to the extent of the external world thus 
 known. The lowest degree, life in one element alone, 
 will give very limited knowledge, as, e. g., of the earth 
 alone, as in animals that live in the ground deprived of the 
 light. But even here the contact of the whole body with 
 the earth greatly enhances the possibilities of sensitive- 
 ness and recompenses the mole, for instance, for his little 
 range of media. Fish are relatively stupid because of the 
 single medium they know, but they have a large and sen- 
 sitive surface in the fin and tail and mouth, to compensate.
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 75 
 
 They have also good eyes. They have, however, no hear- 
 ing as we know it, though they have a perception of vibra- 
 tions and jars. 
 
 The space even in one medium over which locomotion ex- 
 tends also conditions the intelligence. Wide- roaming, easily- 
 moving animals are smarter than stay-at-homes. Locomo- 
 tion calls for vision, and vision is the very sine qua non of 
 conscious intelligence, or that under the control of the will. 
 Some animals that move about freely when young, with 
 eyes and other important organs, lose their eyes and senses 
 when they attach themselves to one spot and become plant- 
 like in habits. 
 
 Those animals which know the air alone are also handi- 
 capped. But the bat has developed such a sensitiveness 
 of his interdigital membranes that he detects the relative 
 density of the air near objects by this means alone, and is 
 thus able, though blind or in the dark, to avoid objects 
 perfectly. 
 
 Most air-livers have soft, sensitive feet, as well as the 
 wonderful wings, so that they know two media, the air, and 
 such solid objects as trees, the ground, etc. The greater 
 number of these media known, the greater the intelligence, 
 other things being equal. So that amphibious birds, those 
 also that swim as well as fly, are relatively nobler than 
 those that fly alone. If they have good walking powers 
 on land, this also helps. 
 
 3. The Development of Intellect also Depends on 
 the Relative Development of the Senses. Fishes are 
 put to a disadvantage by a lack of the senses of hearing 
 and of smell. Snakes are also without the sense of hear- 
 ing, but their long, lithe, soft bodies help them to know the 
 ground, and by a peculiar structure of the ribs and scales 
 each scale becomes almost afoot, so that getting a hundred 
 little leverages on inequalities, e. g., of bark, some of 
 them can crawl slowly up an almost perpendicular surface.
 
 76 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 Deer and dogs have an astounding development of the 
 sense of smell which helps them greatly, as a hundred 
 hunters' stories tell us. 
 
 4. Length of Life is also a noteworthy condition of 
 mental development. The elephant with its hundred years 
 of life, has a great advantage in learning and remembering 
 experiences over his less long-living relatives. Things 
 that live but for an hour or a day know but one instinct. 
 
 5. Association with Man is lastly a powerful helper of 
 intelligence. Our domestic animals imitate and learn of 
 us with avidity. Some dogs have learned to under- 
 stand ordinary conversation. Chickens are slow in this 
 respect, because their feet are hard, they have lost the 
 power of flying, etc. 
 
 Thus, what an understanding of the world we get by 
 sympathetic observation of life ! Universal cellular intel- 
 ligence is aided in becoming specifically manifest, or in 
 becoming the instrument of the individual will, by the sen- 
 sitiveness and amplitude of the bodily exposure to contact 
 with the world thus sensed ; by the relative development 
 of other senses; by length of life; and by association with 
 man. 
 
 But it is especially the Strength and Exercise of the 
 Maternal Instinct, which besides governing the uncon- 
 scious development, and being one of the most fundamental 
 of the conditions of intelligence, is specifically a powerful 
 factor in the production of the intelligence of the genus 
 and of the individual. One of the stupidest of animals, 
 whose feet are hard, whose lips and tail are in this respect 
 useless, the sheep, may be spurred to ingenuity by love, as 
 by no other thing. A patient told me of a mother sheep 
 which had no milk for her little one. It only needed one 
 experience to teach her, when her lamb bleated with hun- 
 ger, to run with the little one headlong to the house, a long 
 distance away, where it was fed " by hand " by the kind-
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 77 
 
 hearted human sisters. Tropical cats know all about artifi- 
 cial respiration. A friend saw a cat take its drowned 
 kitten and roll it up hill, the fore-paws alternately squeez- 
 ing the lungs at every step; in about half an hour of almost 
 frenzied labor the kitten was resuscitated. 
 
 Literature is filled with the devices and marvelous 
 proofs of ingenuity of animal parents in raising and defend- 
 ing their young. The feigning of death of opossums, 
 snakes, and birds; the simulation of wounds, the trailing of 
 wings, the building of nest over nest by the summer yellow 
 bird to prevent the incubation of the egg of the shameless 
 cuckoo, the hiding of snakes under the mother's coils or 
 down her throat, the thousand protective devices and in- 
 genuities all show how strong a force is maternal love in 
 the development of the intelligence. Opossums leave the 
 marsupial pouch early, and clinging to the mother learn 
 many things of the world very early. Nicols tells a comi- 
 cal story of a young kaola which was taken by a cat to 
 nurse with her own kittens. But the kaola had inherited 
 the habit of riding about on its mother's back, a habit that 
 the pussy foster-mother didn't like at all. But she was very 
 patient about it all. A writer in Science, some time ago, 
 tells of the curiosity of a monkey, which in hunting 
 other game on an opossum in his cage, discovered the 
 wonderful pouch full of opossum babies, and examined 
 them with tenderness but profound curiosity. Nicols tells 
 of the laughable attempt of a little kangaroo to find the 
 pouch of its dog foster-mother. 
 
 It is frightful to think of the evil that results from the 
 dissociation and alienation of humanity from animals, or, 
 what is worse, from the nasty habit of considering them as 
 soulless slaves to be used, or as targets to be shot at. 
 When I see some savage human female riding about the 
 streets behind horses whose necks are suffering from infer- 
 nal check-reins, and whose eyes are rubbed sore by stupid
 
 78 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 blinders, driven by a fool who knows nothing of horse- 
 character, I feel very much like wishing to pull that crea- 
 ture out of her cushions, cut off her hair, stick a bit in her 
 mouth, and yank her head back in the same way as she 
 has done with her horses. What else but having been 
 brought up with animals and thus learning how lovable 
 they are, will ever eradicate out of fiendish humans the 
 idea that when they have an hour or a 'day to spare from 
 their work of plundering their fellow-men they must spend 
 it in murdering some animal. Let's go out and kill some- 
 thing ! That is sport ! And, of course, woman will never 
 permit men to be worse than she can be, and so goes on 
 the insane and awful destruction of our birds, of beautiful 
 winged life all over the globe. Beware of a woman with a 
 bird on her hat ! 
 
 What genuine and delightful happiness these little beings 
 give us ! I shall always look back to the days when my 
 dog and I played hide-and-seek in the woods for hours 
 together, and I regret nothing more than the fact that I 
 was unjust or harsh to him once or twice. Knowledge and 
 sympathetic study of animals teaches one more and truer 
 psychology than all the books can do, because in their 
 artlessness they show the secret springs of motive, and of 
 evolution, and form a mirror wherein one may see himself 
 reflected. 
 
 Just one glimpse of the " one touch of nature which 
 makes the whole world kin." Does this anecdote by Kip- 
 ling Sr., not recall the relations of some human couples we 
 have known ? 
 
 " One morning there came a monkey chieftain, weak and limp- 
 ing, having evidently been worsted in a severe fight with another 
 of his own kind. One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes 
 bore terrible traces of battle, and he hirpled slowly along with a 
 pathetic air of suffering, supporting himself on the shoulder of a
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 79 
 
 female, a wife, the only member of his clan who had remained 
 faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them bread and 
 raisins, and the wounded warrior carefully stowed the greater 
 part away in his cheek-pouch. The faithful wife, seeing her 
 opportunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound hand, 
 and opening his mouth she deftly scooped out the store of raisins ; 
 then she sat and ate them very calmly at a safe distance, while 
 he mowed and chattered in impotent rage. He knew that with- 
 out her help he could not reach home, and was fain to wait with 
 what patience he might till the raisins were finished. It was a 
 sad sight, but, like more sad sights, touched with the light of 
 comedy. This was probably her first chance of disobedience or 
 of self-assertion in her whole life, and I am afraid she thoroughly 
 enjoyed it. Then she led him away, possibly to teach him more 
 salutary lessons of this modern and ' advanced ' sort, so that at 
 the last he would go to another life with a meek and chastened 
 soul." 
 
 We have seen that the absolute condition of the existence 
 of the human and animal world depends instantly and con- 
 tinuously upon the secret of the fabrication and storing of 
 food about her seed-children, by the Chemist-Mother of the 
 plant-world. The existence of the living world depends 
 then upon mother-love and upon mother-foresight for food, 
 the primal condition of life-perpetuation. 
 
 But not only for food, but for the feeding itself. The 
 lambent flame of limpid love that burns in the startled 
 wondrous mother-eye of cow, or dog, or human mother, as 
 she gazes down upon her little nursling, is perhaps the most 
 revelatory thing in the world. All the world loves a 
 mother, and all mothers, human or animal, are sisters. A 
 common passion links and unifies them all and makes them 
 alike holy, all commissioned by another mother-heart to be 
 sharers in a divine duty. Step into a pigeon loft. There 
 is one bird which a few hours ago was liberated 250 miles 
 out at sea. He was taken there in a closed basket. He
 
 8o MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 knew nothing of compasses, of astronomy, or of steamers 
 and oceans, but when the basket-cover was raised, by the 
 guidance of an " instinct " the nature or mechanism of 
 which we know utterly nothing, he darted toward home, 
 toward the place of his duties as monogamous husband and 
 as caretaker of the young. Without indecision or varying 
 he came straight to his home over hundreds of miles of 
 water, where no landmarks existed. At once he begins his 
 domestic duty of driving and tormenting his wife toward 
 the nest. The imperious fellow will brook no shilly-shally- 
 ing. Eggs must be laid! Voila tout! When there are 
 enough of them they must be hatched, which on occasion 
 he will help to do, turning the eggs regularly, bringing the 
 outside ones toward the center, etc., so that all the children 
 shall be born together. When the young are there he has 
 an abundance of " soft food " macerated, in his crop, a kind 
 of bird-milk, ready to feed them until their digestive 
 powers are ready for common food. The mother may now 
 go about her business of getting ready for more eggs, and 
 the mother-father attends to the babies, teaching them by 
 and by where to go for food, etc., etc. Who taught the 
 mother to stand over the already laid eggs instead of sitting 
 on them, before the time of incubation of the whole lot 
 should begin ? Who formed each wondrous egg with such 
 provisions that the " white " or food of the young unhatched 
 chick should surround the yolk, and again the yolk about 
 the germinal vesicle, and about all the encasing, protecting 
 shell, with pores or breathing spaces through it for the 
 chick's supply of air ? 
 
 " The section of an egg proceeding from the outside to the 
 center, shows, first, an outer layer of calcareous matter con- 
 taining the coloring pigment, then the inner layer, both being 
 oenetrated by minute canals for the admission of air when the 
 shell is dry. Next within lies the shell membrane, which is
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 81 
 
 separated at the larger end of the egg into a double layer, and 
 includes a small air-space, which increases in size as the egg 
 grows stale and becomes unfit for incubation. Immediately in 
 contact with the shell membrane is the albumen, or white 
 viscous fluid, and again within that the vitellus, or yolk, con- 
 taining the germ enclosed in its own membrane, and lighter 
 than the albumen. The difference in specific gravity between 
 the yolk and white is made, by a singular contrivance, to pro- 
 mote the development of the germ most effectually. From 
 each side of the yolk in the direction of the long axis of the 
 egg, proceeds a cord of condensed albumen extending towards, 
 but not meeting, the end of the egg, and vulgarly called ' the 
 tread,' under the erroneous impression that it represents the 
 influence of the male. Between those cords, one passing 
 toward the large and the other toward the small end of the 
 egg the yolk is, as it were, slung in the albumen. Thus while 
 the germinal vesicle on the outside of the yolk is prevented 
 from coming into actual contact with the interior of the shell 
 by its ' moorings ' in the denser substance of the albumen, 
 the lightness of the yolk determines it to float toward the 
 surface, and the cords allow it to go just so far as is sufficient 
 to keep the germ spot always nearer the upper side of the egg, 
 whichever way it may be turned on its axis. Consequently, 
 that part of the yolk where the most vital part is situated 
 remains, in all circumstances, nearest the source of heat, the 
 mother's body." 
 
 Let me also sketch for you the cares of another mother. 
 This mother, though a vertebrate, has had to develop the 
 hind legs and arches of the pelvic bones in such a way that 
 the young have to be born very early, so early indeed that 
 there is no placental connection with the mother, no blood- 
 feeding of the kangaroo baby before its birth. When born, 
 indeed, it is merely an egg, without a shell, an inch long, a 
 helpless bit of fragile protoplasm. Only a kangaroo mother 
 could care for such a baby. This she does by sticking it in 
 a wonderful pouch of skin beneath her body, and how this
 
 82 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 is done, and how the nipple is got into the mouth and clear 
 down the throat into the stomach of the unformed, muscle- 
 less, motionless bundle, are mysteries of kangaroo mother- 
 hood. What is still more wonderful is, however, under- 
 stood. Without formed muscles there can be no suckling, 
 but nature is, as always, equal to the emergency. The 
 muscles are in the mother's breasts, and she can extrude the 
 milk at will. Another bit of " special design " is required 
 by the fact that as the kangaroo babies grow (the mother 
 moving by jumps, as all know) their weight would burst the 
 marsupial pouch if it were not braced and supported by 
 the marsupial bones which grow out beneath it, and are 
 thought to be ossified tendons of the external oblique 
 muscles. 
 
 The pursuit of food for mate and little ones is, as we 
 have seen, a more subtile but active cause of mental growth. 
 The swifts in building their nests (the edible birds' nests of 
 the Chinese) out of inspissated mucus from the large sali- 
 vary glands, thus transform a weight of material much 
 greater than that of their own body into this gelatinous 
 substance. This drain on the system is so great that if the 
 nest is stolen the second one is not, as was the first, white 
 and pure, free from foreign substances, but is made up 
 largely of feathers, hair, etc. Gould took from the lining 
 of the nest of a long-tailed titmouse some 2000 feathers. 
 The body of the nest was made up of lichen, moss, hair, 
 etc. The weight of the eggs of one sitting is much more 
 than that of her own body, and this expenditure of energy 
 in nest-building and egg-bearing is in all birds relatively 
 enormous. Doubtless to feed the nurselings a bird ordi- 
 narily flies from 300 to 500 miles a day with how many 
 wing-strokes to the mile ? To illustrate the cooperation 
 of the purely physiologic or unconscious processes of the 
 body with the birds' willed or conscious work, it may be 
 noted that during incubation the temperature of the mother's
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 83 
 
 body rises several degrees. God helps mothers ! In this 
 connection also it may be noted that the hornbill feeds his 
 wife and young ones (whom he has securely walled in their 
 nest) through a little hole, with the prepared and regurgit- 
 ated food, in a bag or pellicle, derived of course from the 
 lining membrane of his own stomach. 
 
 The genesial instinct is more plainly the origin of edu- 
 cational ingenuity in birds than in other animals. No two 
 species of birds build nests exactly alike, and the mechanic 
 and artistic ability of some is astonishing. That mother- 
 love in birds begins and carries on the education and ele- 
 vation of mentality there can be no doubt. It is certainly 
 at the bottom of that astounding fact, bird-migration, a 
 phenomenon of wonderful significance in the distribution 
 of the flora, and even of the fauna of the whole world. 
 
 But the same dominant desire also, I judge, governs the 
 entire habits, distribution, and character of all animals. To 
 find a lair or place of safety for mother and young, and to 
 secure food for those at home, must dictate the place of 
 living, and thus, finally, the type morphologically and 
 psychologically of every species of animals. The ability 
 to elude enemies by a thousand devices must form mental 
 habits according to the peculiarities and the length of time 
 of those habits. Volumes might be and have been written 
 describing the myriad means of securing safety and food, 
 and for starting the youngsters in life so that they shall be 
 able to do the same thing again. Pigeons leave the nuts 
 abundant in a thousand trees where they are raising their 
 young, and fly hundreds of miles to get their food, so that 
 when hatched the weak-winged youngsters shall have food 
 in plenty where they are. To illustrate this fact let me 
 describe one thing I have not seen in print, and which 
 shows the instant and incessant government by the repro- 
 ductive instinct : A patient from Mexico tells me he has 
 about 1000 brood mares on his ranch. Each stallion
 
 84 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 defends and commands from 15 to 30 mares, according to 
 his fighting ability. He keeps his family always distinct 
 from every other, and this segregation is so rigid that 
 when the whole thousand are " rounded up " and driven 
 pell-mell into a corral it takes the stallions perhaps hours 
 of intense running, neighing, whinnying, fighting, and 
 hunting, before each has his flock separated by winding but 
 clearly-defined alley-like spaces between each group. Then 
 the men may enter ! When running loose, if one group 
 comes near another, one leader may try to drive or woo a 
 mare of another family, at once resulting in a pitched 
 battle between the two leaders. The fighting is done 
 largely on the hind feet, the fore legs little used, the aim 
 being to seize the other's neck with the mouth. If one 
 gets a good " hold " in this way the result of the battle and 
 the possession of the object of battle is soon settled. 
 The period of gestation of the horse is eleven months. 
 My informant knows that it several times occurred in one 
 family that colts born nine or ten months after a mare had 
 been placed in the family were at once kicked to death by 
 the jealously-wise head of the family, who had not been 
 consulted in regard to the matter. 
 
 A number of amphibious animals have the trick of living 
 long beneath the water, and of keeping the submerged 
 body entirely out of sight while exposing the tips of the 
 nostrils to breathe. To find a home and security for his 
 family the beaver has developed a marvelous degree of 
 reason and architectural genius that has long been the 
 admiration of man, and is superior to that of the bee. The 
 platypus burrows in the bank of a stream, one tunnel 
 entering below the surface of the water, another above it, 
 and both leading to the nest. Thus he can use either and 
 escape all observant enemies. 
 
 It seems at present impossible to estimate the due pro- 
 portion of influence this necessity of nest-making, cave-
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 85 
 
 homing, and lair-devising, all for the young, has had in 
 developing ingenuity and mentality in animals, but I can- 
 not doubt it has been the preponderating influence, direct 
 and indirect, in spurring one species of animal into the 
 human. Archeology and anthropology teem with hints 
 and proofs of this fact. Home-making lies at the basis of 
 all progress out of animality into humanity, and of all 
 advances out of savagery into civilization. And is it not 
 plain that the family-relation is the direct product and 
 machinery of maternal love in its large sense ? Every ele- 
 ment of the most complex civilization springs from or is 
 vitally related with the home-making industry. Mere food, 
 until a high degree of civilization is reached, is perishable 
 almost in an hour, and therefore is the object of the hour's 
 need ; but possession of one place of meeting, or of seclu- 
 sion, begets the fact of ownership. Tools, investments, 
 houses, all things manufactured or durable, become pos- 
 sessions, and hence arises the conception of property, and 
 the entire legal aspect of human relationship is thus seen 
 to spring out of the family relation and flows inevitably 
 from that relation. 
 
 One of the most sympathetic and open-eyed observers of 
 animal life, Hudson, says that most all wild animals have 
 their games, dances, plays, or amusements, and especially 
 all birds. What an influence love exercises in the forma- 
 tion of plumage, coloration, forms and habits, of all ani- 
 mals is now known of all biologists, indeed, of all intelli- 
 gent people. Certain it is, therefore, that most all beauty 
 in the animal world (and of course in the world of flowers 
 it is wholly true) springs from some phase of maternal 
 love. An oriental proverb says that " even the young of 
 the ass is beautiful ! " Childhood, either of plant, of animal, 
 or of man, is the one superlative exhibition of beauty. A 
 glimpse, a perfume, a flashing and gleaming of something 
 superhumanly, supernaturally beautiful, lingers long and
 
 86 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 caressingly about all young things. The greatest picture, 
 the ever-painted model, the never-realized ideal of art- 
 excellence, is the mother and her child. Whatever power 
 for good or evil from Troy-times to present-times womanly 
 beauty and charm has had in human life, surely the whole 
 of it can be credited or debited to but one thing. Art, 
 whether in poesy, drama, novel, sculpture, or painting, is 
 simply myriad-phased love. Back through all forms of 
 life, clear to the protozoa, the beautiful is linked with the 
 maternal in indissoluble unity. Estheticism, art, all that 
 charms and delights, is the reward and benediction of the 
 divine Father and his pleasure in the renewal of living 
 forms. 
 
 Now, exactly the same truth applies to morality, or the 
 emotion of altruism ! In all family life when the sexual or 
 family relation is not in action, there is selfishness, utter 
 indifference, or positive enmity always manifest. The prin- 
 ciples of individuation, the struggle for existence, the pre- 
 servation of self, called the first law of life (but wrongly so- 
 called), have unlimited and absolutely exclusive sway of all 
 beings and functions, except when love and the care of the 
 young come in to contradict and overrule them. Maternal 
 love is the miracle of all biologic existence. It cannot be 
 conceived as arising by any action of " environment " or 
 from the necessities of the organism standing nakedly 
 there. Into every life, nay, into every fiber, bone, and cell 
 of every living thing, the great God, Love, stoops down 
 and permeates, nay, He clutches and masters each for a 
 purpose beyond and after. From the standpoint of pres- 
 ent-day science, from the standpoint of determinism, fate 
 or chance, from the standpoint of the agnostic, or of his 
 twin-brother, the atheist, this maternal-paternal love, this 
 all-powerful, all-forming, and all-transforming energy is the 
 most illogical, most uncaused, most utterly unaccountable 
 thing conceivable. We can explain all things else in some
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 87 
 
 half-blundering, half-satisfactory way, but for this exotic 
 wonder there is no scientific accounting that would not 
 make a mummy laugh. It is, it comes to us from without, 
 and that is all we can say. It is the one patent, convincing, 
 unanswerable proof of the divine, or the supernatural, enter- 
 ing and grasping the organic mechanism for ends beyond 
 that organism itself. And its first, last, continuous, and 
 increasing effect is to make every organism value and 
 cherish a being that is not self. It is therefore the very 
 basis and essence of all that is ethical and religious. Every 
 animal is put in training by it for humanization, and be- 
 comes through it a faultless illustration for us of the super- 
 naturalism and the glory of ethics and of other-love. To 
 the childless a hundred animal stories teach that there are 
 orphans we should make our own children. Alas ! The 
 heart-broken sadness, the pathos beyond tears of the 
 motherless. Read Kipling's Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, and 
 then think of what is going on in the breasts of thousands 
 of children in the " barrack-schools " of England, and in 
 the orphan asylums of America. 
 
 The limits within which the role of the maternal instinct 
 is confined are more rigid in the animal world than in the 
 human. I doubt if any one knows anything about the old 
 bachelors and old maids there. Of course, there are but 
 few such, but these few must occupy strange positions in 
 life. After the productive age has passed, one wonders if 
 wild animals keep up the relics of family life. Probably 
 not, I fear. At least, one species of birds, the cuckoos, are 
 sharp little scoundrels. They build no nests, and carrying 
 their eggs in their mouths, slip them into the nests of other 
 birds, where they are hatched some days in advance of the 
 eggs of the rightful owners. Then with characteristic in- 
 humanity, or unbirdity, they proceed to gobble up all the 
 food and kick out of the nest the rightful children. Male 
 birds often arrive in migration from their thousands of miles
 
 88 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 of flight before their mates, but the same mates do come, 
 and they come year after year to the same locality and 
 rebuild their nests in the same identical spot. This home- 
 attachment has numerous illustrations. A water-wagtail 
 once built her nest on the framework beneath a railway 
 passenger car, which later was put into local service, run- 
 ning four times a day between Cosham and Havant, in 
 England, in all about forty miles. At this time there were 
 four young birds in the nest, and the little father, while his 
 family were away promenaded the turntable, etc., awaiting 
 the shunting of the car bringing back his wife and babies. 
 A pair of tomtits for three years built their nest in a letter 
 box. All the letters posted fell upon the sitting bird, and 
 the splendid postman gathered the letters and left the 
 birdies. 
 
 Among animals the limits of the control of the maternal 
 feeling are rigidly confined to simple necessity. Love seems 
 to disappear as soon as the young can possibly fly and get 
 their food another proof of its supernatural quality and 
 origin. I have oftened wondered, too, at the general 
 indifference of the father to the young. In many, per- 
 haps most animals, the father seems to care no more for 
 his children than if they were moving bushes. Cer- 
 tainly, he cares no more for his own than for those of 
 another, and the idea of any love toward grandchildren is 
 absurd. Not even the mother shows this. 
 
 But it is of the greatest interest to note that with the ap- 
 pearance of humanity and with its ideas of home and of 
 property (both products of maternal love) there arises a 
 natural extension of the scope and control of the family 
 instinct, and the interest of the parents continues into or 
 through adult life. Support and protection of the mother 
 continues beyond the child-bearing period, grandchildren 
 are beloved (sometimes I have noticed, even more than the 
 children themselves were), more distant relatives are held
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 89 
 
 within the family affection, and the patriarchal type of 
 society is established. When the higher ideals of society 
 and civilization are permitted to arise, the egis of love is 
 extended over the nation, and patriotism with its great in- 
 fluence in war and history appears. Finally, the highest 
 development of humanity arises, and, still an actual out- 
 growth and extension of maternal love, ethics and love of 
 humanity, and of the divine Father-Mother of humanity, 
 and of all life, takes possession of the loyal being, whether 
 he be social reformer, philosopher, pietist, or religionist. 
 
 I fear that I have wearied you : Let me then epitomize 
 the principles about which I have gathered my much-wan- 
 dering and perhaps incoherent thoughts : 
 
 1. Among the factors of evolution there is one of which 
 scientists have made too little or no account. This com- 
 prises the entire grouping as one, of all the instincts 
 variously denominated genesic, sexual, or reproductive, the 
 whole series of the various functions, necessities, and results, 
 going to the begetting, gestation, nourishment, and train- 
 ing of the young. Conceived thus in its entirety we may, 
 for want of a better name, denominate it maternal love. 
 
 2. In the vegetable this energy largely and entirely dic- 
 tates the morphology and physiology of all types and 
 species of plants, and is the sole factor in their flowering, 
 seed-forming, and in the phenomenon of growth. 
 
 3. The stored food, fashioned by the cunning and secret 
 chemistry of the plant, and provided by maternal love for 
 the first nourishment of its young in the seed, is the ulti- 
 mate source of nourishment of the entire animal world, 
 humanity, of course, included. 
 
 4. In the animal world the maternal sentiment more 
 largely than any other or all other causes, leads directly 
 or indirectly to the development of ingenuity, nest-build- 
 ing, and other forms of home-making, and hence to mental 
 evolution and progress to higher types.
 
 90 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 5. It is doubtless in this special way the prepotent factor 
 in the humanization of the one genus or species of animal 
 from which we have sprung. 
 
 6. In the human race it has been the dominant influence 
 in the formation and progressive growth of society through 
 its effects in the creation of property and private rights, 
 and in the founding of homes, of families, etc. 
 
 7. In both the animal and the human race it has been 
 almost the sole source of the appreciation, ideals, and facts 
 of esthetics, all forms of art drawing their inspiration and 
 data primarily or at second hand from its exhibition and 
 function. 
 
 8. Religion and the belief in the supernatural apart, 
 there is not, so far as we can see, any other cause that has 
 been in the least operative in producing, throughout all 
 biologic history, any ethical or altruistic fact or function 
 whatsoever. To this great instinct is entirely due all the 
 practices operative in plant or animal for the welfare of 
 any other than self. And in the highest society of to- 
 day every ethical act derives, directly or indirectly, from it. 
 
 9. Almost all other evolutionary factors may be more 
 or less satisfactorily accounted for on theories of " na- 
 tural " causes, such as " natural selection," the persistence 
 and correlation of energy, the " sensitiveness of proto- 
 plasm," etc., etc., but viewed in its singleness or in its en- 
 tirety, this instinct, so far as our intelligence can judge, is 
 plainly uncaused and inexplicable, and, to put it boldly, is 
 a miracle, thrust among all other natural forces, and domi- 
 nating all for its half-hidden, half-revealed purposes. 
 
 May I relate a dream ? 
 
 I thought that maternal love and all pertaining thereto 
 ceased appearing in our world because mankind did not 
 appreciate the beautiful and gratuitous gift, and were so 
 ungrateful, even abusive of it, that God grew tired thrust-
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 91 
 
 ing it upon us. Men and women had grown so callous 
 that they took upon themselves the awful duties of parent- 
 hood, and then neglected their children. They made 
 orphans by thousands and then left them to be cared for 
 in horrible asylums, their tender, unpracticed, unguided 
 longings bruised, or like cellar-plants, left groping for hid- 
 den light. They ruthlessly killed and destroyed all things 
 for selfishness and amusement. 
 
 And so, in my dream, all that related to maternal love 
 silently ceased to be, and I wandered among strange-seem- 
 ing people and profoundly changed scenes. The whole 
 animal world became other ; ornament, color, gay feather 
 and lightsome song gave place to sad makeshifts of utili- 
 tarian hair, bristles, splotches, screeches, and grunts. Even 
 in the eyes and faces of my best friends all became different, 
 hopelessly pitying or inhumanly hard ; deep-seated selfish- 
 ness gleamed upon one everywhere from snake-like eyes. 
 Smiles one never met, but an occasional risus diaboli; cac- 
 chinations of derision or ridicule were heard, for men and 
 all things were painfully grotesque and altered in appear- 
 ance. Men jeered at each other because all beards had 
 disappeared ; the glory of woman's hair had also gone. 
 Worse than this, the beauty faded out of woman's form and 
 feature, and instead of the divine charm of laughing eyes 
 and radiant winsomeness, they all became half or wholly 
 repulsive, coarse, much like men, and yet without the dig- 
 nity or strength of men. The men had likewise become 
 womanish without becoming in the least degree womanly. 
 The beautiful, except perhaps the flash of moon on wave 
 or sun on mountain-top, had gone out of the world. 
 
 No children were born, and those that existed were 
 thrust out to die or live neglected, or were fed out of illogic 
 pity. There was not a flower in the world. Almost all 
 human social gatherings ceased ; why should people meet 
 together now, when they had no pleasure in each other,
 
 92 MATERNAL LOVE. 
 
 and when each looked on the other thinking only how his 
 money could be gotten away from him ? Men left their 
 homes and were never heard of again, and in all places 
 strangers, uncouth, ill-clothed, brutal, and cruel, came and 
 went in objectless ebb and flow. Who had wealth turned 
 it into gold or portable goods. All commercial credit 
 ceased ; banks closed their doors ; every one barricaded 
 his house, and went about " armed to the teeth." The 
 iron-mills and rolling-mills went on, and many manufacto- 
 ries, but everywhere was harshness, and grind, and ugli- 
 ness. Despair and idiocy, and crime and insanity instantly 
 increased a hundred-fold. An awful shudder, a cosmic 
 horror crept like cold snakes through the arteries ; the 
 blood curdled in all hearts. Women whispered to men an 
 awful message, and men moaned it to each other ; hungry- 
 eyed dogs divined it in their masters' eyes ; it ran like 
 doom along the branches of the leafless trees, down to the 
 roots, and there every mole and insect was frozen with 
 terror of it. God is dead ! were the agonizing words that 
 palsied thought and emotion, and that clutched at the life- 
 springs of every bosom. 
 
 Slowly the prices of everything commenced rising and 
 famine began. It was found during the second year that 
 the stock of grain was nearly or quite exhausted. Seed 
 sowed in the ground came up, but there was no new seed 
 formed. The cattle had died off in great numbers during 
 the first and second winters because the owners kept the 
 little corn that was left to still their own personal hunger. 
 No calves or lambs were born, no chickens hatched, and 
 the older animals could not get enough grass, leaves, or 
 roots during the summer to carry them into the next 
 winter, the third, when death would surely come. But 
 they were not allowed to live that long; and during this 
 second year every animal all over the world and of what- 
 soever kind that could be reached by the ingenuity of
 
 MATERNAL LOVE. 93 
 
 man's hunger had been sacrificed. Then began universal 
 famine, cannibalism, and unutterable horror. Everywhere 
 was death, and death was everywhere. Within two years 
 from the death of love there was naught but death. Rocks 
 and sand and waters there were, a desert-world just like 
 that before the angel of maternal love came among the 
 rocks and sands and waters, and made out of them the 
 world we know, the world of grain and fruit, the world of 
 sweet, cool grass, the world of rustling leaves, the world 
 of beautiful, wonderful animal forms, the world of friends, 
 the world of baby- faces, the world of God!
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS.* 
 
 In a letter from a famous thinker and writer lately re- 
 ceived, commenting upon some statement concerning a 
 physiologic function, my correspondent writes : " I am, as 
 a physiologist, quite opposed to regarding life as an entity 
 instead of a function." With this bit of unscientific dog- 
 matism a popular plebifactor of science is well satisfied and 
 proceeds in this way : " Chemistry has now told us that 
 ' Life ' as an entity has no more existence than the phlog- 
 iston of the earlier chemists, and that the series of phe- 
 nomena to which we give the name of life are changes 
 undergone by complex compounds of carbon composing 
 very large and unstable compounds." The only proper 
 answer to this is a choice example of curbstone slang, 
 more forcible than polite. It is itself a compound, "very 
 large and unstable," but of simple construction, being made 
 up of about equal parts of lie, ignorance, and impertinence, 
 in mechanical mixture, not chemical union, f Such things 
 are to be regretted because they harm the advance of true 
 science, a matter in which we all have the most vital and 
 vivid interest. But the unscientific prejudice of many like 
 my correspondent, who think they find in physiologic and 
 biologic studies confirmation of a materialistic creed, is 
 
 * A paper read before several societies. 
 
 j- In the best, most recent and most scientific text-book on the subject I 
 know of, I find these words : " The chemical operations performed by the 
 living cell cannot be imitated in the laboratory, or explained by any known 
 chemical laws." (Halliburton, Handbook of Chemical Physiology and Path- 
 ology, p. 2IO.) 
 
 94
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 95 
 
 chiefly to be regretted for their personal sakes ; they miss so 
 much and narrow their minds quite unnecessarily. No man 
 ever saw anything that in the remotest degree could logically 
 suggest that life is a function of matter ; there is not a 
 biologic fact that does not demonstrate the contrary ; and 
 yet these unscientific philosophers pretend that they are 
 pupils in a school that at matriculation demands freedom 
 from dogma, and induction only after patient study of facts. 
 To the student of the history of thought these dogmatists 
 are seen to be simply the dupes of a psychologic Zeitgeist 
 of reaction from past theologic dogma. Scientific dogma- 
 tism has the advantage over the religious variety in being 
 sooner exposed and shorter-lived, but it is altogether more 
 inexcusable. 
 
 I would be glad in the interests of a monistic faith to 
 see any means of escape from the dualism of life and 
 matter, but frankly observing the facts I do not see the 
 least loop-hole of any such possible escape. In addi- 
 tion to the chemic elements and their compounds, we in- 
 clude under the term matter, the ether with its functions 
 of light, heat, electricity and magnetism. These, with the 
 chemic elements and their compounds, are all governed 
 absolutely by the laws of the physical or mechanic forces, 
 and compose the material universe. This material uni- 
 verse gives me no hint of design or designer. Frantic at- 
 tempts have been made to argue its derived existence from 
 the fact, first of its orderliness. But in the first place what 
 order exists is generally more apparent than real, and it is 
 easily forgotten that there exists the most astonishing 
 jumble and disorder as characteristics of great parts if not 
 the most of the physical universe, in the oceans, in the 
 facts of meteorology, in the Arctic regions, in the configura- 
 tion and structure of the earth's crust, in the meteors and 
 other examples of disorder in the solar or stellar systems. 
 In the second place, the order observable is always the
 
 96 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 result of the law of gravity ; the stratification of the earth's 
 crust, the flow of rivers, the revolutions of the planets, the 
 very formation of planets and systems, lastly and of most 
 importance, the formation of the molecule and of all chemic 
 combinations and laws, seem all to be simple instances of the 
 results of gravity. Now if one finds evidence of a creator in 
 gravity and gravity-produced order, his mind is differently 
 formed from mine. Another argument that has been relied 
 on is a supposed logical necessity to ascribe to a cause what- 
 ever exists ; " matter must have been created because it could 
 not have created itself." All the logic in this lies in the 
 equally true paradox, God must have been created because 
 He could not have created Himself. It is only when 
 design and purpose and nonmechanical reactions distin- 
 guish a thing that logic requires its reference to a designer. 
 We do not dream of attempting to fathom the origin of 
 life, but when nonliving matter shows living forces and 
 mentality, we must ascribe these to something extra- 
 material. " The final and strongest defense of the argu- 
 ment for a derived origin of matter consists in the uni- 
 formity of size and nature of all the atoms of one element. 
 Identity requires explanation. All the atoms of hydrogen 
 are identical. If the result of chance, they would have 
 been of infinite variety of size and qualities." In answer to 
 this it might be said that in the infinite attritions of an in- 
 finite universe in infinite time, like atoms would necessarily 
 be produced and be gathered together. In a shot tower 
 the simple fact of descent sorts the different sized shot with 
 mathematical exactness. The heavier fall the faster. 
 Space is infinite an endless shot tower and gravity almost 
 alone would sort varieties of atoms into classes. The sixty 
 or seventy varieties of elements are possibly the chance- 
 groupings or gravity-sortings, and classes, of the atoms. 
 The mechanic law of " Natural selection " would apply 
 here in a way it cannot apply elsewhere. The atoms that
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 97 
 
 vary from the greater average would fall of themselves to 
 another class, or would quickly be ground to uniformity 
 by the attrition of their fellows. 
 
 It is life alone that gives incontrovertible evidence of 
 divinity not of an omnipotent or omniscient one but of 
 one that by the very fact that he is finite and working 
 under difficulties brings him all the nearer to our hearts 
 and makes love and veneration the spontaneous offering of 
 all sane minds and sympathetic hearts. Untouched by 
 life the universe would be in the condition of the moon, 
 without a vestige of any living thing. The trans- 
 cendent metamorphosis worked by life is hardly to be 
 realized by one who has not stood in the awful desolation 
 of some wholly lifeless region. The vegetable world, and 
 it alone is able to evolve from inorganic materials a true 
 but probably a comparatively simple protoplasm. The 
 higher animal is utterly dependent upon this power of the 
 plant, relying for its food upon the formed protoplasm 
 robbed from the vegetable kingdom. The fact shows the 
 essential unity of the plant and animal worlds, and 
 emphasizes the fundamental difference of the world of life 
 over against the world of dead matter. The two are 
 entirely uncorrelated phases of being, no monistic faith or 
 philosophy offering a hint of any hidden unity or identity 
 of the two. The ingenuous perception and conviction of 
 their utter disparity is the faith of mankind. To assert the 
 nonexistence or the derived nature of either is philosophic 
 moonshine. There is no dexterity of mental gymnastics 
 that renders thinkable the creation or annihilation of 
 matter, or the generation out of it of life or mentality. All 
 sane thinking must at the outset posit as axiomatic these 
 two independent and underived forms of Being. 
 
 The Chemic Molecule. The most striking character- 
 istic of an inorganic molecule is that it is a rigidly 
 mechanical system. It has no spontaneous movement, and 
 9
 
 98 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 no adaptive reactions, except such as are mechanically pre- 
 dictable ; under given circumstances, thermic and mechanic, 
 its component elements being present, it will always 'form; 
 under a definite impact of heat it will always break up 
 into its elements. As a matter of convenience we speak of 
 it as reacting, but it rightly has no reaction, being only 
 acted upon ; it is dead, movable only from without. In 
 forming, a definite and invariable amount of heat is ab- 
 sorbed, and the same amount being again given it, it at 
 once breaks up into its constituent parts. Heat being the 
 indicator of atomic vibration, thermo-chemistry would be a 
 science, if perfected, of surpassing exactness, and would 
 indicate by a heat-equivalent, the precise constitution and 
 condition of every compound. It would be the record of 
 the exact number and extent of path of its atomic vibra- 
 tions all that we could desire to know about it. It would 
 constitute the astronomy of the molecule. Because, it 
 would appear that in a final analysis, gravity almost or quite 
 explains the intimate interactions of the molecule's parts, 
 as it does those of the elements of the solar system, the 
 vibrations of the atoms doubtless following the same laws 
 as the planets in their circuits. Every molecule, we know, 
 is a closed and unitary system, its elements never in con- 
 tact, but ever in ceaseless vibration, with varying rapidities 
 and extent of path. The vibrations of the ether penetrate 
 the densest bodies, showing that the atoms move wide 
 apart from each other like the planets. The moving planet 
 by displacing the circumambient ether, may possibly create 
 a slight ether-breeze, as, many miles per second, it darts 
 through space ; it may be likened to an almost frictionless- 
 net passing through water, or a zephyr through a leafless 
 tree. Hertz passed electric or ether-vibrations quite un- 
 changed through a solid stone wall several feet in thickness, 
 and light seems to escape the atoms of glass much as 
 supposed arrows would escape the planets if shot from a
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 99 
 
 star through our solar system. A molecule or a mass of 
 molecules is dense just in proportion to the extent of swing 
 of its atoms. Heat is the measure of these swingings or 
 revolutions. Absolute zero in temperature, a calculated 
 thermometric registration of 273 C. would correspond to 
 atomic immobility and absolutely impenetrable density. 
 This is only a reasoned or imagined condition, not only not 
 existing, but beyond experimental production. The num- 
 ber of miles per second traveled by a single atom of the 
 atmosphere of our room is calculated and the number of its 
 collisions with other atoms and the sides of the room. 
 The pressure of the gas in your gas pipe or against the 
 gasometer is simply the sum of the blows of its individual 
 atoms upon the containing sides. The blow of the black- 
 smith's hammer upon the anvil is the blow of one 
 mass of billions of vibrating atoms upon the mass of 
 billions of other vibrating atoms. The hardness of a body 
 is the common name for the lessened but not stopped 
 swingings of its constituent parts. The softness of a body 
 or its gaseous state is due to the increased vibration of its 
 elements. Give the atoms of a wall of cold steel more 
 " swing " than they already have, and you could walk 
 through the wall as through air. The disruption of a mole- 
 cule by an increment of heat is effected by a simple increase 
 of the centrifugal force of the atoms like that attending in- 
 crease of revolution in a body rotating about a fixed center. 
 Increase the speed of Neptune in his orbit and he would 
 be flung off beyond the control of the Sun's gravitation. 
 It is doubtless in this way that the impacts of ether-waves 
 effect chemic changes. If the vibratory period of the ether- 
 wave be identical with that of certain loosely-held elements 
 of the molecule, the disruption is instantaneous, as in the 
 photographer's sensitive plate. Chemic molecules are thus 
 seen to be physical microcosms, ruled by a rigid mechanic- 
 alism. Were our microscopes sufficiently powerful and our
 
 ioo LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 vision sufficiently swift, we should find many varieties of 
 simple and complex systems of intervibrating elements of 
 which our solar system is but a single type, others hidden 
 by our want of a perfect telescope but whatever the 
 variety, all alike ruled by a simple physical law. The for- 
 mation of a complex chemic molecule, one composed of 
 numerous varieties of elements, illustrates the law in the 
 definite mathematic proportions of its constituent parts, the 
 relative feebleness or strength of the bonds of union, in the 
 preservation of compound radicals, etc., etc. 
 
 The Organic Molecule, or " Somacule." How does 
 the protoplasmic* or living molecule, or somacule, differ 
 from its inorganic analogue, the chemic molecule? Prim- 
 arily and profoundly, of course, in that it has life. The 
 materialist says it differs in no important respect. As the 
 sodium chlorid molecule has a property we call saltiness, 
 so the protoplasmic molecule has liveliness, both necessary 
 qualities of their molecular structure mere functions of 
 the peculiar combinations of the elements of each. It is 
 waste words to ask if the salinity can be taken from salt, 
 leaving the salt there, as the life can be taken from proto- 
 plasm, and leave the protoplasm present. It is quite use- 
 less to argue with such folk. It is simply a question of 
 perceiving, and when one is congenitally afflicted with this 
 sort of mental strabismus and amblyopia, it is absurd to 
 expect help, except as one says, from a surgical operation. 
 He cannot see that the difference between living matter 
 and dead matter is the greatest difference existing between 
 perceived things. 
 
 * The word protoplasm is an unfortunate and misused term. It has no 
 meaning whatever now, having been used to designate such a multitude of 
 differing things. In all probability the substance most commonly spoken of 
 as protoplasm is not living, but is stored nucleus-food. The nomenclature of 
 these things needs reorganization. Until this is done we are forced, for con- 
 venience's sake, to use the word as a synonym of living matter.
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 10! 
 
 To be more specific, the somacule differs from the mole- 
 cule in its amazing complexity of atomic construction. 
 No analysis is possible, the guessings as to the number 
 of constituent atoms differing by many hundreds, some 
 estimating the simplest system to be composed of from 
 three hundred to a thousand. Lieberkuhn's formula for 
 albumin is C 72 H 112 N 18 O 2 2S ; Harnack gives it as C^Hs^N^- 
 Og^ ; Schiitzenberger as C 2 ioH392N 65 O 75 S 3 . Inorganic forces 
 can build up no such a complex system as this. It requires 
 a hypermechanic power. If our planetary system were 
 suddenly enriched by one or two thousand dazzling 
 planets, moons, and comets, would not confusion and 
 collision certainly result? Mechanic products like atoms, 
 chemic substances, nails, etc., are characterized by likeness 
 or identity. But all organic products differ one from 
 another. Brothers differ in expression, physical organi- 
 zation, and characteristics. Not even twins are as like as 
 two atoms or two samples of the same chemic compound. 
 It is said that in transfusion of blood the assimilative 
 tissues of one person will not accept the formed corpuscles 
 of another. These have to be broken down and the 
 component materials, not the end-products, used or ex- 
 creted. All that is gained by transfusion is a sudden 
 supply of nutritive material in an emergency to tide over 
 a temporary and dangerous want. This points to what 
 must be admitted as a fact, that protoplasm is infinitely 
 variable. It is probably true that at no two moments of the 
 existence of a cell is its molecular condition and atomic 
 construction exactly the same. It is probably true that no 
 two cells are exactly of the same constitution. It is almost 
 certainly true that the cells of different organized tissues 
 must differ from each other, one organ requiring cells of 
 wholly different powers and hence of varying constitution, 
 from the cells of another organ. It is beyond question 
 that the general formula of molecular and atomic construe-
 
 102 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 tion must differ in each and every individual. A dog can 
 distinguish the smell of the impress of his master's foot or 
 hand from that of every other person in the world. If the 
 volatile particles of cell-metamorphosis differ so contin- 
 uously and exactly, then the general chemic formula of 
 the cells must necessarily differ. In this way, within 
 limits, the protoplasmic formula of one family must differ 
 from that of another, of one nation or race from other 
 nations and races, etc. Every one recognizes the peculiar 
 body-odor of the African, the Chinese, of certain families 
 of animals, etc. All this is in striking contrast to mechanic 
 products, and it only finds its explanation in the infinite 
 adaptability of life to every material used as food, to every 
 peculiarity of the historic development, and to every change 
 in the enviroment. Alum, carbon dioxid, or quinin sulphate 
 are the same whether produced a thousand years ago, and 
 however produced, but a living cell, or a living organism, 
 is never duplicated by Nature, every being that has lived 
 on the earth being different from every other that has ever 
 lived or that ever will live. 
 
 Since Life works only by and through the individual 
 cell, creating and evermore remolding the cell according 
 to the peculiar work and circumstance, glimpses are caught 
 of purposive and progressive spontaneity and of cosmic 
 import. Mechanicalism has no place or application here. 
 In the bioplastic molecule, Life, the divine architect, builds 
 an exquisite order of bewildering complexity out of the 
 crude materials of simple mechanic vibrating systems, and 
 sits in its midst guiding and utilizing the physical in the 
 interests of the metaphysical. Purpose a quality un- 
 known in mechanical systems or molecules is the distinc- 
 tive characteristic of all living things. The molecule- 
 building power of the inorganic world is the fulcrum ot 
 Life, and the release of force by the breaking down of the 
 more complex molecule into the simpler (katabolism) is
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 103 
 
 the means whereby Life acts within the physical domain. 
 The purposive direction of energy is her one function, and 
 the energy is always derived from the reduction of more 
 complex to less complex compounds. To coin a couple 
 of needed terms biokinesigenesis (the production of vital 
 energy) is always the product of cytolysis (the disruption 
 of cell-substance), the unlocking of a chemic bond and the 
 release of subjugated atoms. It makes no difference what 
 the form of vital energy may be, whether it be a secreting, 
 contracting, a nervous, or a connective-tissue cell, its every 
 function subsists by reason of a reduction of its substance 
 to a simpler system, ending finally in a change in con- 
 struction of product, a metamorphosis of molecular into 
 molar motion, a transfer of energy, a support of weight, 
 etc. The analogue of this vital production of energy by 
 cytolysis is the condensation of the solar system, the pre- 
 servation of the sun's working energy, whilst his total 
 energy is being reduced. Unlike the somacule, the solar 
 system cannot be fed from without, and so its shrinkage 
 and decreasing energy will finally end in stagnation and 
 death. It is from the energy derived from the metabolism 
 of the somacule that life gains the power of preserving a 
 uniform temperature. This power is one of the most 
 striking proofs of nonmechanicalism, of supernaturalism 
 if you please, displayed in organic existence. All life's 
 forces are dependent upon such a condition of atomic 
 vibration, or heat, as will preserve the somacule in the 
 highest state of complexity or unstable equilibrium. So 
 delicately poised must be the molecular balance, that the 
 slightest breath of desire or stimulus can at once release 
 small, large, or continuous increments of energy.* To 
 
 * Of the total product of energy or heat evolved by the body, about seven 
 per cent, is used in external mechanical work ; of the remainder, four-fifths 
 are lost through the skin, the remaining fifth by the lungs and excreta.
 
 104 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 preserve this wonderful equipoise and adjustment is an as- 
 tounding exhibition of overruling intelligence and watch- 
 fulness. Every mechanic system tends to stagnation and 
 death, and must be preserved by extrasystemic additions of 
 force. The physical system, clock, molecule, solar me- 
 chanism, or steam engine, cannot recoup itself, cannot 
 prevent the tendency to " run down." Protoplasm alone 
 has a self-preserving and self-regulating power. 
 
 Every physician knows the meaning and the danger of 
 fever. With fever, life is losing control of her atoms, the 
 most fundamental condition of her government of organic 
 processes. Centrifugalism is getting the better of centri- 
 petalism. With increased atomic vibration there is in- 
 creased dissipation of force, and dangerous dissolution of 
 the somacule. Katabolism gains upon anabolism. With 
 increased loss there must be increased supply, and this fact 
 gives everlasting warrant for the quaint epitaph of the old 
 physician, " He fed fevers." The preservation of an equa- 
 ble temperature of the body, is the instant, true and genuine 
 miracle continuously performed by life. But if fever is 
 dangerous, a subnormal temperature is far more so. It 
 means death, molecular and somatic. The somacule can- 
 not deliver force if the dance of its constituent atoms is 
 crowded and chilled and lessened. Though submerged 
 in food and water, it dies of starvation and thirst. These 
 things show us how narrow a range of choice and power 
 life has, and how jealously matter imposes upon life its 
 rigid conditions. A few degrees of temperature above the 
 normal is dangerous, a few below is death. If an automa- 
 tic mechanism governs the uniformity of temperature, its 
 device and perfection must have been a task of long and 
 subtle difficulty. If the materialist prefers to ascribe the 
 production of the wonderful mechanism to his new deity, 
 Natural Selection, one can only answer that the endow- 
 ment of a mechanic principle with divine powers explains
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 105 
 
 nothing, and seems no advance upon the elder nomencla- 
 ture. 
 
 The Cell. The cell may be described as an organized 
 multitude of somacules, corresponding to a universe of 
 solar systems. The atoms correspond to the planets, aste- 
 roids, etc., the somacule to the solar system, the cell to the 
 whole of the interrelated suns of one nebula or universe. 
 The harmonic law of stellar relations has not been dis- 
 covered and therefore the further comparison of the animal 
 body to the interrelations of different masses of nebulae, or 
 universes, if one may be pardoned the absurd expression, 
 becomes meaningless. The somacule is the biologic unit, 
 the cell the physiologic unit. It has been estimated that 
 the smallest living particle visible under the microscope 
 contains about two million molecules of living matter. 
 But this estimate needs two qualifications. The first is that 
 from 80 to 85 percent, of every protoplasmic mass consists 
 of water ; and the second is that a large, if not much the 
 larger part of the cell-mass is composed, not of true living 
 protoplasm but of dead food, not yet transformed into living 
 matter, and of dead waste-product, or excreta, both of 
 which are no part of the true organism. Thus the real 
 living, directing and modifying part of the cell is composed 
 of not more than 10 or 20 millions of somacules. It is this 
 fact that gives the swift beheading stroke to every material- 
 istic theory of heredity and descent. Suppose that every 
 somacule had an individuality and an identity peculiar to 
 itself; would any school-boy deny that the ancestral and 
 racial inheritance of the child from its parent does not in 
 the stupendous multitude of details, outnumber these paltry 
 20 millions by incalculable millions of millions ? The ab- 
 surdity becomes ludicrous when we further remember that 
 at an early stage of cell-development, these few millions of 
 elements give no evidence of structural difference. Then 
 again if a somacule is to carry from the parent the power 
 10
 
 io6 LIKE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 to mold a special organ or tissue of the child, it must 
 learn its lesson in the like tissue of the parent, and having 
 so learned it, must pass thence to ovary or testicle and be 
 incorporated with millions of other cells which have learned 
 their lesson from every other tissue of the parent body. 
 Now every cell of every organ has a certain peculiarity of 
 function, of position, or of nature. Therefore, if we are 
 logical, a germ-cell (or sperm-cell) must serve as pupil 
 under all the tutor-cells of every organ and tissue of the 
 parent-body, and thence proceed to form and develop first 
 the ovum or spermatozoid, and then the child-body. But 
 if this is an absolute logical demand, the total mass of the 
 cells of the ovum must equal in number those of the 
 parent-body. That is, the ovum is as large as the adult 
 parent ! This reductio ad absurdum is but one of the in- 
 numerable logical quagmires in which one finds himself 
 wallowing who sets out to follow the Will-o-the-wisp of 
 materialism. If it be supposed that a speck of bioplasm 
 ^5-3- of an inch in diameter as a physical mechanic system 
 contains the billionfold results of millions of years of past 
 ancestral experience, one can but ask as to the mechanism 
 of such preservation and transfer of ovogenetic gemmules. 
 Of what avail is it to endow the mechanic molecule with 
 a self-created omniscience, omnipotence, and infinite cun- 
 ning ? Does one think thereby to get rid of a hated tele- 
 ology? It is only evidence of inexpugnable obtuseness. 
 It would seem more sensible to call God by the old name 
 than to dub him Protoplasm. 
 
 Cell-Assimilation. The protoplasmic cell is a food- 
 seeking, food-digesting, and food-assimilating organism. 
 A very small part is really the seat and organ of life; the 
 bulk is dead food or dead excreta. It is a minute egg, the 
 living germ or dominating- part being a fractional part, the 
 rest a magazine of stored food for the use of the growing 
 and reproducing individual. In that universe of cells, the
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 107 
 
 animal body, it is much the same. The actually living 
 protoplasm is but a part of the total body weight. Just at 
 what instant in the process of assimilation the dead food 
 becomes the living protoplasm, it is impossible to say, but 
 it seems probable that true directive energy and life only 
 fully inhabit the formed but yet functional tissue. In that 
 amazing and subtle process beginning with the crude food 
 at the mouth, and ending with the most complex cell of 
 the acting, fixed tissue, there is a long, intricate series of 
 substances and metamorphoses of progressively ascending 
 complexity and unstable equilibrium into which life has 
 only a partial and progressive ability to enter and dominate 
 to her purposes. The methods of effecting this metamor- 
 phosis are towards the last of the most exquisite delicacy 
 and subtlety ; but from the first the handling is less and 
 less molar and mechanical, ever more chemical and vital. 
 Previous to the final cell-finishing and fitting, Life cannot 
 have her proper house-warming and full reception, but 
 must fashion, and furnish, and manipulate from without, by 
 tools and agents, as it were, until finally, by indwelling 
 agency, when the living pump, the heart and its adjuncts, 
 have brought the almost completed food-product to the 
 living cell of the fixed tissue, mechanics are at an end, and 
 the metabolism is thenceforward so far hidden from our 
 deepest scrutiny. 
 
 Cytogenesis. An important fact in reference to the 
 existence of protoplasm is that only life can produce it. 
 There has never, so far as we can find out, been a living 
 cell produced except from a preexistent living cell. It 
 requires protoplasm, and living protoplasm to beget its 
 like. Nothing is deader than the absurd theory of spon- 
 taneous generation. In the light of the complex vibratory 
 nature of all organic compounds, what theory could be 
 more ludicrous ? Even the most empty-headed of material- 
 ists now steer clear of the hypothesis an hypothesis by
 
 io8 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 the way, absolutely foundational to their whole belief and 
 creed. To reduce by heat a lot of living matter, the 
 labyrinthine intricacy, and marvelous complexity of whose 
 vibrating systems no human mind can gain but the 
 faintest glimpses, to a jumble of indiscriminate atoms, and 
 then expect highly organized and living vibratory systems 
 to arise spontaneously, this is the limit of nonsense. 
 It were as absurd to pulverize a thousand watches in a 
 mortar and expect much shaking to again bring forth 
 watches. Since life is an independent force existing apart 
 from all matter, and since it creates protoplasm, it becomes 
 sure that, in a certain sense, spontaneous generation did 
 at one time, or first, occur. The absoluteness of the truth, 
 omne vivum ex vivo is simply a proof of the labor life has 
 had to get a foothold in matter, and the advantage in a 
 foothold once gained. However great, the miracle of 
 present assimilation is not so great as that of first impres- 
 sing inorganic vibrating systems into protoplasmic service. 
 The foothold once secured it is easier to draw in mechanic 
 systems and endow them with life than it is to create anew 
 the lowest type of living matter. Hence the fundamental 
 necessity and reason of the great scientific truth of Evolu- 
 tion. It is always easier for life to proceed from present 
 capacity and advantage than to originate new forms. 
 Reproduction, growth, and modification are easier than de 
 novo production. How life conquered the first tremendous 
 difficulty of once getting entrance to and control of a 
 simple physical vibrating system is at present beyond our 
 possibility of thought. But proof that life can convert 
 mechanic systems of vibrating atoms into protoplasm is 
 not needed : it is the ever-present miracle of the growth 
 of organic forms. An oak germ in its lifetime, from purely 
 inorganic materials, transforms into protoplasm tons of 
 inert matter, lifts thousands of tons a hundred feet high, 
 transforms other thousands into the semi-living tissue we
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 109 
 
 call wood, etc. The difficulty life has had in first gaining 
 entrance to a mechanic system /. e., the difficulty of 
 spontaneous generation has led two acute thinkers to 
 suppose living germs must first have been brought to our 
 planet from some other by a wandering meteor. But 
 whence came life to the other planet? The theory seems 
 to be no more probable than that the first and lowest 
 vegetable forms arose at life's touch, upon our earth in the 
 dim past. The true " missing link " would be between the 
 highest mechanic or inorganic molecule and the lowest 
 unicellular vegetable protoplasmic cell. All that follows is 
 willingly granted to evolution spiritually conceived. The 
 evolutionist easily " sees men as trees walking." The 
 primal difficulty lay in catching nascent vibratory changes 
 of the most complex and unstable inorganic geometric 
 molecules and utilizing them for domiciliation. We 
 cannot doubt that life was everywhere present and vividly 
 alert to grasp the opportunity, because we now stand in 
 dumb amazement at the tremendous stretch and strain 
 everywhere shown by imperfect and limited protoplasm to 
 grow and extend itself over, above, and through the world, 
 with little less than infinite pertinacity and divine ingenuity. 
 The Cell-nucleus. The father of the modern cell- 
 theory, Theodor Schwann, took his hint of the function of 
 the nucleus from the botanist, M. Schleiden, who had 
 observed that the nucleus is the primal source of changes 
 and of division of the vegetable cell. The preexistence 
 of the nucleus in the cell became thenceforth his funda- 
 mental principle in the study of the cells of animal life, 
 and he found that all the tissues of whatever kind and 
 variety of the animal body are nothing but transformed 
 cells. These truths are to-day incontrovertible. It is in 
 the nucleus of the cell that biologic interest and micro- 
 chemic investigation center. There can be little doubt that 
 the nucleus is the true living matter. Life has its seat
 
 no LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 there. Changes proceed thence. It controls the nutritive 
 and metabolic changes of the cell, and whilst alive is 
 always undergoing these changes. In cell-division it is 
 the nucleus that first divides. " The cytasters and radiating 
 lines in the protoplasm around the poles of the spindle of 
 a dividing cell remind one forcibly of the effect produced 
 by placing a magnet in the midst of some iron filings, the 
 radiating position of the metallic fragments around the 
 poles of the magnet indicating the direction of the lines of 
 force." We know that the nucleus consists of a kind of 
 network or sponge-like cluster of fibrils about and through 
 which is the nuclear matrix of more liquid substance. The 
 nucleoli may be thickened portions of the fibrillae, or they 
 may float free in the matrix. The chemic construction of 
 the nucleus contains an indefinite number of highly complex 
 substances, such as nuclein, plastin, adenin, etc. As in all 
 such investigations, chemic analysis is here impossible. 
 Nuclein, the more important constituent, shows distinct 
 chemic differences when derived from different sources. 
 No definite chemic unit exists, and it seems probable that 
 the nucleins are members of the numerous class of organic 
 phosphorus-compounds. 
 
 Cell-nuclei are divided into two great classes, the resting 
 or nondividing, and the dividing. The term karyokinesis 
 is given to the series of changes taking place in the divid- 
 ing nucleus. These changes are too intricate and exten- 
 sive, too little understood, to be detailed here. The stages 
 are described by Waldeyer as : I. A resting nucleus; 2. 
 The skein or spirem stage ; 3. That of the appearance of the 
 achromatic spindle ; 4. The equatorial stage and formation 
 of the monaster; 5. Metakinesis ; 6. The dyaster or daugh- 
 ter-stage; 7. The dispirem or daughter-skein stage ; 8. The 
 resting daughter nuclei. All this is but a manifold naming 
 of some of the crude results of a millionfold, intimate and 
 mysterious series of changes, of whose nature and methods
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. ill 
 
 we are profoundly ignorant. But the central truth that 
 shines forth is that the nucleus of the cell is Life's castle 
 of domiciliation and throne of power. Precisely as an 
 earthly king seated at the center of government, by means 
 of his prime ministers and deputed authority, binds the 
 parts of his nation into a unitary government, and controls 
 all for the common good of all, so does Life rule the king- 
 dom of organic matter through the central seat of govern- 
 ment, the cell-nucleus. But one awfully-suggestive infer- 
 ence comes from this : though the lowliest living beings, 
 vegetable and animal, are unicellular, the bulk of organic 
 beings are multicellular, and an organism like the human 
 body is composed of billions of subjugated cells, of self- 
 forgetting, serving, tireless, cheerful slaves. If life can 
 only operate upon and through matter by the mechanism 
 of the cell-nucleus, then it follows that the life of the indi- 
 vidual cell is itself not individual. It is itself the appearing 
 of a life common and universal. The point to be empha- 
 sized is that in the creation of an organ and an organism, 
 each cell must be moved to its place, and perform its func- 
 tions as an unit, and by its self-motility. Mechanic force 
 is utterly out of the question. The organ is formed by each 
 cell's individual action. No cell can act upon another. In 
 the maneuver of a regiment of soldiers it is not an external 
 force, as a wind or a battering ram, that moves all to their 
 places. Each man is moved from within as a unit, domi- 
 nated by the command of the colonel. Exactly so life 
 dominates the nucleus of each separate cell. The harmo- 
 nizing, ordering intellect lies behind the individual cells in 
 the unity and mentality of Life. 
 
 A reaction from the doctrine of the individuality of cells 
 has lately arisen, consisting in the attempt to conceive and 
 prove the body to be not an aggregate of cells, but a single 
 cell-mass. It was felt that the doctrine of cell-individuality 
 was fatal to mechanicalism, because the body is a unit
 
 112 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 dominated by a common interest that reduces individual 
 cells to the complete servitude of design and unity. But 
 this way of escape is closed by the developmental history 
 of the " cell-mass," and by the inexpugnable fact that struc- 
 ture proceeds by the harmonization and subjection of sep- 
 arate cells, each acting independently from within its own 
 nuclei. Cell-unity and independence, so far as other cells 
 are concerned, is an incontrovertible fact. The unity 
 sought in the conception of the organism as a single huge 
 cell is a vain delusion : it can only be found in the reins of 
 power and life reaching from each individual cell to the 
 hidden hand of the Master-Driver, Life. The cell is ser- 
 vant of Purpose and Design. Imperfection, death, disease, 
 sin, and wrong, are the products of imperfect mastery of the 
 cell, of the insubordination of matter; but progress, and 
 religion, and right, are the names for cheerful cell-subordi- 
 nation, for complete mastery by life, for the quickness of 
 cell-response to the tides and will of the great ocean-master, 
 thus seeking through innumerable bays, estuaries, canals, 
 and mechanisms, to reach into the inaccessible lands of 
 matter and flood them with its infinite fluid life. Upon the 
 mechanic theory, life as a function of matter, etc., there is 
 no explanation of the subordination of cells, their literal 
 enslavement as units of structure. What possible mechanic 
 force could make a billion cells shape themselves into a 
 tube here, a strand there, a sieve-like wall, a contractile 
 bundle, or a supporting structure? 
 
 The new-born cell, as we have seen, has all the powers 
 in greater or less perfection, shown by any perfected or 
 differentiated organ. It is only and simply by setting 
 a cell to do a special and limited work that we have 
 specialization of function and production of structure or 
 organs. What mechanic force or self-created necessity 
 would sort out and mold to particular use by specialization 
 and hypertrophy one set of cells to become contractors,
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 113 
 
 another membranes, others as containers, supporters, trans- 
 mitters, secreters, excreters, protectors, reproducers, and 
 the thousand other diversified functions performed by our 
 various tissues ? The marvelously intimate and subtle na- 
 ture of life's manner of working becomes truly awful when 
 we realize that all this unity in diversity is reached by the 
 purposive agency of one unseen mental power operating 
 alone through the nuclei of these countless billions of in- 
 dividual cells. The work indeed is never mechanical, never 
 by masses or ab extra, is unexceptionally nonmechanical, 
 always through units, and ab intra. Neither must we for- 
 get that not one cell of all in our whole organism can, as an 
 individual, have any self-satisfaction. It is evermore doing 
 something for some purpose it knows not of, evermore act- 
 ing for some other part. It points elsewhere for an ex- 
 planation of its function, having in its own work no " final 
 cause " as the theologians would say. It is again precisely 
 so as regards each organ and set of organs. The digestive 
 system is working for the circulatory system, this in turn 
 for all the fixed and functional tissues, the bones to uphold 
 the body, the muscles to move it, the nervous system to 
 bind all parts into unity, etc., etc. No cell, or organ or 
 tissue whatever can say that it exists even in the slightest 
 degree for itself. Its excuse for being is a reference else- 
 where. If logic be a science or logical inference a mental 
 necessity, this means that the final cause lies beyond the 
 body itself, qua body, and in that region of unseen life 
 which exists behind, in, and through all its objectifications. 
 The Parasitism of Animal Life and " the Knighting of 
 Matter." There seems to me to be something peculiarly 
 significant in the robbery of the means of its existence by 
 the animal from the vegetable world. There is in the first 
 place hardly an order of lowly animal forms that does not 
 get its food from the plant-world. The plant can form a 
 living protoplasm from inorganic materials. This the
 
 H4 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 animal cannot do, and hence his universal appropriation 
 of vegetable protoplasm, ruthless and continuous, for his 
 own selfish needs. Beyond this kind of universal pillage 
 the animal world, below man, does not go. But with the 
 entrance of the human mind the wholesale system of rob- 
 bery is extended a thousand fold. In the first place, he, as 
 a meat-eater, adds to his own robbery of food directly from 
 the vegetable world, by a tremendous slaughtering of 
 inferior animal forms. These last by his purposive breeding 
 and systematic care, are increased in numbers a thousand 
 fold, and thus is organized and increased the great system 
 of attack upon the plant-world and reckless appropriation 
 of its labor and stored products. The flesh of animals is 
 concentrated, potentialized vegetable protoplasm. In the 
 second place, man, not content with food, descends with an 
 almost savage fury upon the world of plant life for other 
 means of self-gratification. Continents of forests are cut 
 down to furnish him wood, and the stored-up forests of 
 millions of past years are being exhausted for fuel ; a 
 large part of the cultivable land of the globe is used to 
 give him clothing, either directly, as cotton, linen, etc., or 
 indirectly, as wool, silk, etc. To enumerate the things 
 wrenched by man from the vegetable world mediately or 
 immediately, and from the original intent, would require a 
 cyclopedia, and would indicate the physical bases of most 
 of our civilization. The commerce of the world is the 
 almost unique result of this " plan of campaign." 
 
 All this seems at first sight to be so inherently wrong 
 and unjust that in view of the deep unity of all life, whether 
 plant or animal, one wonders if the world of plant-life will 
 submit forever. Is some long-stored revenge in waiting 
 for mankind ? Will not retribution overtake him for such 
 a world-wide million-year-long organized system of reckless 
 plunder? In the destruction of forests a retributive justice 
 is manifest in the havoc and devastation of waterways and
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 115 
 
 valleys through which the unstored rainfall rushes to the 
 ocean, leaving drouth and field-denudation as the aftermath. 
 In the conflagration of cities man is punished for building 
 with robbed wood instead of the more fitting inorganic 
 materials he would have used had he not been so furiously 
 greedy and hasty. The wars and bloodshed that make up 
 the subject matter of history* are all conditioned upon the 
 hell-driven determination to wrench some natural advantage 
 of climate, some form of natural or acquired wealth all, 
 at last, vegetable wealth from another robber-possessor. 
 Slavery, and its modern form, industrialism, are examples 
 of the same fact. Civilized wealth is masked slavery, the 
 toilers being the direct robbers, the millionaires being simply 
 the slave-drivers and captains of the bandits and caravans. 
 Royalty, official and social position, " protective " and 
 prohibitive tariffs, monopolies, trusts, et 'hoc genus omne,a.re. 
 schemes and labyrinthine deviltries whereby mankind 
 subjects itself to men, and all go a hunting to loot the 
 magazines of force created by grass and leaf by the 
 mysterious vegetable divinity, Chlorophyl. In the 
 diseases of civilization there lurks an evident retributive 
 justice. In prostitution, hysteria, drunkenness, vice, in 
 insanity, blindness, deaf-mutism, trampism, in the crowd- 
 diseases, in syphilis, in phthisis, etc., etc., the discerning 
 eye runs back along the lines of motive and causation 
 until the fundamental origin of all is found in the selfish 
 greed, laziness, and desire to enjoy without work, that have 
 caused men to prey upon the vegetable world, to congregate 
 in cities, to demand and not give, to scorn while using the 
 very sources of life. Lastly in the new knowledge of the 
 role more and progressively played by microorganisms in 
 
 * " History, from one end to the other relates simply of wars. But the 
 origin of all war is the desire to thieve; hence Voltaire justly says, ' Dans 
 toutes les guenes, il ne s'agit que de voler." This furnishes the material for the 
 world's history, and its heroic deeds." Schopenhauer.
 
 116 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 the development of disease and their influence upon civilized 
 life we catch a truly awful glimpse of vegetable revenge. 
 Because the bacterium, bacillus, micrococcus, and spirillum, 
 the yeasts, molds and fungi, that in scores of families and 
 types, and in billions of ever-present numbers hover about 
 us, infesting the air, food, and water we drink, penetrating 
 every organ of the body, the causes direct or indirect of 
 most all deaths and mortal diseases these microbes are 
 little plants. The warning and retribution may be plainly 
 seen in these facts ; the punishment is the fitting and 
 natural consequence of the sin. Because of the fact that 
 all organic forms are incarnations of one unitary life-force, 
 there should not be a perpetual war of one great order 
 upon another. They who work lovingly in the fields and 
 forests are given ungrudgingly the wealth of the vegetable 
 world, and they are free from the above-mentioned diseases, 
 evils, vices, and punishments of the "civilized man." The 
 vegetable world says, " ask and ye shall receive " ; she gives 
 with a complement of love and health to those who live 
 with her; to those that plunder and ravish, she sends her 
 little warriors and allies, and lo ! consumption* and 
 zymotic diseases destroy her destroyers.f 
 
 * The bacillus tuberculosis only settles in lungs weakened or insufficiently 
 developed ; chest-expansion and exercise, proper lung-development is the 
 certain prophylaxis of pulmonary tuberculosis. 
 
 * The plainly- marked tendency of modern bacteriologic and patholog- 
 ic research is to prove that the microorganism of specific diseases is not 
 primarily causative, nor even necessary to the disease. It seems to be certain 
 that the cocci and bacilli would not have settled in the tissue had the tissue 
 not been previously diseased. The tissue was unfit for healthy life and gave 
 hostage to the little vegetable forms. The weakness of the victim invited the 
 assault. The chemico-physical conditions of the organism were tending to the 
 disorganization that the advent of the microorganism hastened. It is more 
 and more plain that the microbe is a kind of a ferment, innocent enough were 
 there not present substances in such unstable equilibrium that they were on the 
 point of dissolution. The pathogenic microbe is the exploding fuse ; the 
 powder or dynamite must preexist.
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 117 
 
 This systematic plundering by humanity is founded upon 
 a wonderful fact that I have ventured to call the Knighting 
 of Matter. According to medieval custom when a man 
 had once been made a knight he was by the ceremony 
 raised out of the common mass of mankind, and not even 
 by his own fault or will could he ever be again degraded 
 to the common level. A glory or grace had become his 
 forever. In the same, or in a far more real way, matter 
 crude chemic elements are caught up by life and, once 
 stamped with her seal, become ennobled with utility and 
 significance never possessed by matter not so knighted. 
 Not even the metals can become of any use to us without 
 some metamorphosis by life. And except the metals 
 there is nothing that makes the world enjoyable or useful 
 unless it have been knighted by life. The veriest rag or 
 bit of leather of the dust-heap is provocative of interest 
 and rich with significance to the eye that loves life's ways 
 and her faintest footprints, because the mind runs back 
 through all metamorphoses and modifications to the living 
 organism of which this was once a vital part and where it 
 gained all the quality that makes it precious and useful to 
 man. All our clothing, houses, furnishings, coal, foods and 
 true valuables, are useful to us because life once molded her 
 somacules and cells into structural forms and then endowed 
 them with a power and plasticity and utility and beauty, ot 
 which they can never be divested. Life's intellect is dis- 
 played in their wondrous order and ingenuity, her powers 
 in their durability, her goodness in their perfect service- 
 ableness, her love in the bounteousness of the gift, her 
 grace in the beauty and charm ever lingering about them. 
 The Significance of Structure or Organization. 
 There is, we have said, a class of pseudoscientists who 
 aver that life and mentality are the products of organiza- 
 tion. The sullenness and the conspiracy of silence with 
 which these wiseacres receive the repetitive demonstrations
 
 Il8 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 of there illogicality is both pitiable and amusing. In all 
 the life-histories of every organic being that has lived on 
 the earth there was never an exception to the rule that 
 function precedes structure, and life antedates organization. 
 It is forgotten that numerous classes of living animals are 
 organless throughout their entire lives, and that these non- 
 structural masses of living jelly show every one of the six 
 great types of physiologic function. They possess I. 
 Contractibility ; 2. Irritability or response to stimulus; 3. 
 Respiration; 4. Assimilation, or anabolism ; 5. Excretion 
 or katabolism ; 6. Reproduction. All physiologic powers 
 and processes of the highest animal body are comprised 
 under these terms, and in no way go beyond them. Nay, 
 more the simple protoplasmic cell or the most primitive 
 individual living element also possesses these functions. 
 If it were not so, where would the organ or animal body 
 get these qualities ? The organ and body are simply com- 
 binations of the cells. " Nihil in molecule quid non prius in 
 atoma." A multitude cannot exhibit qualities not possessed 
 by the individuals. Evolution cannot produce what was 
 not first involuted. Development cannot bring out what 
 was not there to develop. * The sensitiveness of proto- 
 plasm is said to explain all. It certainly does when " sen- 
 sitiveness " is " explained," and when protoplasm is " ex- 
 plained," and when a world of other inexplainable things are 
 not slyly hidden under these terms, just as the old-fash- 
 
 * Merely to call the consciousness "nascent" will not serve our turn. 
 It is true that the word signifies not yet quite born, and so seems to form a 
 sort of bridge between existence and nonenity. But that is a verbal quibble. 
 The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature comes in at all. The 
 quantity of the latter is quite immaterial. The girl in " Midshipman Easy " 
 could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying " it was a very small 
 one." And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any phil- 
 osophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continu- 
 ous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape 
 must have been present at the very origin of things. Professor James.
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 119 
 
 ioned piano tuners swept all the discords of the key-board 
 into one to-be-avoided octave. Instinct and the higher 
 functions of nerve-structures are glibly explained as exten- 
 sions of reflex action. But reflex action is itself a term for 
 a multitude of mysteries ; among which are the recipient 
 end-organ, the mechanism for transforming external into 
 neural force, the conducting nerve, the " reflecting " gang- 
 lion, or center, the reconduction of the message, the trans- 
 fer of the same to the muscle or receiving organ, the resul- 
 tant activity of the last, etc. Every organ is formed before 
 it is used, and many organs find no explanation until adult 
 life shows their use. Wherever purpose, there is mind. 
 What power could form an organ for use twenty years 
 after, except a power that foresaw and foreknew the after- 
 use ? I have a profound reverence for Darwin, and heartily 
 believe in Evolution, but the explanation of the modifica- 
 tions of organisms by so-called " natural selection " is 
 already outgrown, thoroughly unscientific and inadequate.* 
 An Indian pictograph represents the Great Spirit quite as 
 well. It is a clumsy, crude device of materialism to avoid 
 acknowledgment of an intelligent, seeing, and designing 
 life-force within an organism, that not only created the 
 organs but ever adapts them to each exigency and envir- 
 onmental change that arises. Life that precedes and 
 creates the organs must be wiser and more expert than the 
 instruments she creates. Organization cannot explain 
 mentality, but mentality explains the organs as tools and 
 helps. Such a tool is the brain, created by Life in the 
 womb, with mechanisms and preadaptations that do not 
 find their full functional fruition for many years. Was the 
 superb ingenuity and power that thus in the dark and long 
 in advance of need, made and located those million ganglia 
 
 * See e.g., Syme, on the Modification of Organisms, where some of the 
 arguments against Natural Selection are clearly stated.
 
 120 LIKE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 and nuclei, interlacing them with many million insulated 
 commissural fibers, with astounding delicacy arranging, 
 forefeeling, planning, fixing so that when the infinitely 
 varying stimulus should come from without there should 
 be its correspondent receiving and answering mechanism, 
 was this power inferior in intellect and vision to the 
 machine it had created ? 
 
 Much is made by materialism of the dependence of men- 
 tal phenomena upon corporeal conditions, the mental in- 
 fluence of disease and drugs, the loss or change of mental 
 conditions by cerebral injury, etc., etc. The whole point is 
 poorly taken, and beside the mark. The criticism may be 
 freely admitted to carry so far as it goes, but it applies only 
 to the expression of thought, not to its generation, and 
 moreover, to its expression by a certain mechanism. Or- 
 ganization is differentiation of function ; just as in a highly 
 differentiated society, if all the watchmakers were per- 
 manently sick or injured, there would be no watches made 
 or repaired, so a disabled or diseased part of a nervous 
 system must affect the working of the whole nervous sys- 
 tem. But the work of the nervous system is not to " secrete 
 thought" but is (in part) to express it in a certain way, and 
 as the society can teach other members to become watch- 
 makers, so new nervous systems can be created by Life, 
 and in repair can teach other parts of cerebral substance 
 to learn to do the work of an injured part. 
 
 Then what shall be said from the materialistic stand- 
 point of this vis medicatrix nature? ? What a " stunning " fact 
 it is! To repair the injury of the "organ of thought" 
 is that not proof of thought and ingenuity beyond and be- 
 hind organization? The wisdom of the unconscious 
 exceeds by infinity the wisdom of the conscious. 
 
 All great thought comes unbidden, seems to be an in- 
 spiration born out of a Sea of Mind in filling and uphold- 
 ing the wavelet of our finite mind. The great mind
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. m 
 
 of Life created the little mind of our consciousness 
 creating first the instrument of the nervous system as an 
 aid to itself in its work. The brain may be the organ of 
 speech and action, but of thought No ! Its utterance is 
 comparable only to the babblings and lispings of child- 
 hood, the not-understood mimicries of words that the 
 parent taught and alone understands in full. Languages, 
 literatures, and philosophies, are the child's attempts to 
 learn the profound hieroglyphics of universal life, the 
 little Teachings out toward a conscious understanding of 
 the mighty thought of the silent and invisible Lord, who, 
 before he created, understood the mechanism of our little 
 understandings. 
 
 Imperfect Incarnation. Evidences of Life's inability 
 to adequately subjugate matter are everywhere manifest. 
 The will and desire are clearly patent but the inability is 
 also pathetically certain. Everywhere there is the heroic 
 struggle against the intractableness of the instrument. 
 Perhaps the most obvious example consists in the fact that 
 the material, the inorganic tools, serve only a temporary 
 use. As the old material is used, it loses its usefulness, 
 and new supplies have to be grasped. Life catches up bil- 
 lions of force-containing molecules, extracts their energy 
 and again throws them aside. The chemic elements of our 
 body are being changed every instant, new supplies being 
 brought in as ceaselessly. A great stream of materials is 
 thus passing through the organism. It is said five-million 
 red-blood corpuscles die with every breath we take. The 
 organism persists unchanged because it has a changeless 
 substratum of immateriality to confer continuity upon it. 
 But material forms having no permanency are in continual 
 flux. They will not be held beyond a passing second. 
 Hence the tremendous expenditure that hunger entails 
 hunger, the evidence of matter's fearful fickleness, and its 
 satisfaction, the evidence of Life's wonderful energy. In 
 ii
 
 122 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 the whole organic world this imperious necessity must ab- 
 sorb nine-tenths of the attention and energy of life. Like 
 some terrible Louis the Fourteenth, matter will compound 
 with life only on the condition of demanding some 80 or 
 90 per cent, of the total income. 
 
 Secondly, consider what death means and how Life con- 
 quers or evades it. Death is plainly but another sacrifice to 
 the insatiable and mutinous servant. In youth Life has the 
 material " well in hand," but soon the jealousy of matter 
 grows and demands all. The bones grow brittle, the mus- 
 cles stiffen, weaken, wither ; the brain and nervous tissues 
 hold out best, Life having a more direct and firmer grasp 
 upon them, but even they become easily tired. Finally, 
 though usually happening if no disease arise, or special 
 organ be attacked, life seems literally choked or squeezed 
 out of its home and death is conqueror. But Life has been 
 cunning and active long before this : with the shrewdest 
 foresight and ingenuity the dread event has been fore- 
 fended. Far in advance, by the most intricate and strange 
 mechanism, Life has gathered to a focus a representative 
 bit of her best and most perfect physical material, and 
 uniting it to another bit of similar material elsewhere con- 
 tributed, to give it vigor, care, nourishment, time for 
 growth, etc., etc., the whole wonderful production of sex 
 and all thereto appertaining being one of the prerequisites 
 she soon has ready a new being, new in appearance but 
 yet a transfiguration and perpetuation of the old and 
 Death is thwarted ! Avaricious matter takes the old body, 
 there is a better already assumed. Le roi est mort, vive le 
 roi ! But the note of victory and the charm of ever- 
 renewed youth must not blind us to the fact of the tre- 
 mendous expensiveness of the process, and that at last it 
 is all a makeskift, an escape from a fatal calamity by super- 
 human exertion and ingenuity. It is a hairbreadth escape, 
 effected with shameful loss of dignity and even downright
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 123 
 
 trickiness. One of the steps of the device is such a paltry, 
 and filthy evidence of desperation that no better proof of 
 Life's finiteness is needed. It is at once the world's joke 
 and the world's tragedy, and must ever so remain. Each 
 of us is Sancho and the Don rolled in one; we can only jeer 
 at ourselves while weeping with self-pity, and in this mood 
 we know not whether to offer Life our admiration or com- 
 miseration. Sympathy for the hero in distress is embittered 
 by the plight he has put us in. 
 
 Yet another evidence of the power of the servant over 
 the master is a set of facts that always* delights the hearts 
 of the gentlemen who continuously repeat, " This will 
 never do ! " Nothing pleases a class of God's critics better 
 than a supposed proof of his incompetence or blundering.* 
 They gloat over the persistent reproduction of semiatro- 
 phied, disused, or functionless organs, the supposed poverty 
 of power or device, the stupidly-continued creation of the 
 useless. The pleasure which these folks have betrays the 
 animus too plainly : " The developmental history of the 
 kidneys" is much made of, and "the process of converting 
 an hermaphrodite worm into a warm-blooded animal." 
 " The six obsolete canals belonging to the alimentary canal 
 alone;" "the argument for design utterly put out of the 
 court by the awkwardness of the whole plan," " the blind 
 effort of nature," sentences like these make one wonder 
 where the critic got his power of criticism. He talks 
 as if he were not himself ex hypothesi a product of the 
 "awkwardness " " undesign," and " blind effort." Can the 
 stream rise higher than the source ? whence the power of a 
 mechanic evolutionary product to criticise and scorn the 
 evolutionary process ? The impertinence of fools is amus- 
 ing when it is not disgusting. There can be no doubt of 
 
 * One of the most unblushing of these upstart impertinents is, strange to say, 
 a woman. So far have we come ! Corruptio optima pessima.
 
 124 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 the fact that matter has inherent necessities and laws, and 
 that Life has to adapt herself to them and use or evade 
 them as best she can. It is said that there is a disease of 
 the human prostate in which there occurs the secretion of 
 chalk-like substances the late resurrection of an inter- 
 rupted habit and a far-away memory of egg-shell days ! 
 But in health there is no pathologic recurrence to the 
 habits of a million years ago, and the fact as a whole, 
 seems to me to be greatly to life's credit. When she has 
 control, that is, can keep health, she can, as it were, keep 
 down the old habit that seeks to arise. It is likewise to 
 her honor that there are not more thymus glands, atavisms, 
 functionless muscles, and survived relics of other times. 
 Life has much to do to create new organs in response to 
 new needs, to forefend new dangers, to look after her many, 
 many children a tirelessly busy mother ! Mayn't we ex- 
 cuse an occasional slip or doze ? Don't we love her all the 
 more, all the more vitally and really, that she is not omnis- 
 cient and omnipotent ? 
 
 The preservation of the delicate changelessness of the 
 body-temperature, of which we have spoken, is another 
 task imposed by matter, that keeps Life sleeplessly watch- 
 ing and alert. In fact, the history of Evolution is but 
 an enumeration of the difficulties Life has always been en- 
 countering in tl\e work of incarnation. In thinking how 
 terrible these have been we can but feel gratitude welling 
 in our hearts when we see victorious Life crowning success 
 with vital abundance, when play and laughter override 
 tragedy and tears, and when beauty tops utility.* 
 
 * " * * * a force sublime which moves to good, 
 Only its laws endure. 
 
 " This, is its touch upon the blossomed rose, 
 
 The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves ; 
 In dark soil and silence of the seeds, 
 The rohe of spring it weaves.
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 125 
 
 Individuality and Personal Identity. It may be asked, 
 in view of the indwelling of a common life and its action 
 only through cell-nuclei, if this fact does not render doubt- 
 ful and finally destroy any belief in that hypothetically in- 
 destructible peculiarity of character we call Personality or 
 Identity, and in its unlimited continuance. Happily there 
 can be but one answer. The insane love of self, the hyper- 
 trophy of individuality which characterized the Romans, 
 and is now again attaining a furious exaggeration, is to be 
 looked upon as a sad accident of the struggle for existence. 
 The whole fact is once again a corollary of the difficulty 
 Life has had to get and to keep its foothold in matter. To 
 
 " That, is its painting on the glorious clouds, 
 
 And these its emeralds on the peacock's train ; 
 It hath its stations in the stars ; its slaves 
 In lightning, wind and rain. 
 
 " Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man, 
 
 Out of dull shells the pheasant's penciled neck ; 
 Ever at toil it brings to loveliness 
 All ancient wrath and wreck. 
 
 " The gray eggs in the golden sun-bird's nest 
 
 Its treasures are, the bee's six-sided cell 
 Its honey-pot; the ant wots of its ways, 
 The white dove knows them well. 
 
 " It spreadeth forth for flight the eagle's wings 
 
 What time she beareth home her prey ; it sends 
 The she-wolf to her cubs ; for unloved things 
 It findeth food and friends. 
 
 " It is not marred nor stayed in any use; 
 
 All liketh it ; the sweet, white milk it brings 
 To mother's breasts ; it bringeth the white drops too, 
 Wherewith the young snake stings. 
 
 " This is its work upon the things ye see ; 
 
 The unseen things are more ; men's hearts and minds, 
 The thoughts of people and their ways and wills, 
 Those, too, the great law binds."
 
 126 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 preserve her forms against destructive tendencies and dan- 
 gers, to give each individual animal such vantage-ground 
 as would insure the preservation of self and the propaga- 
 tion of offspring, and so of her own incarnation in matter, 
 Life has had so to exaggerate the disease of individuality, 
 so to overfill each organism with the instinct of self-preser- 
 vation and ruthless appropriation of others' rights, that we 
 have the cosmically-wide facts of parasitism, the carnivora- 
 outfit of instincts and implements, Louis Fourteenth's, 
 modern millionaires, and the pathology of civilization. One 
 of these most curious of morbid products consists of the 
 fact of founding religions, with their systems of rewards 
 and punishments, upon this instinct of self-preservation. 
 The hunger for an everlasting continuance of existence, ot 
 a partial, narrow, undeveloped peculiarity of type personal 
 identity or immortality will some time come to be looked 
 upon as a strange atavistic hypertrophy and perversion of 
 a passing phase of Evolution. Our true welfare consists, 
 of course, in becoming unindividual, impersonal, in slough- 
 ing off the accidents of development, in eating our way 
 out of the pupa-stage of individual personality into the 
 psychic life of the universal personality. A rigid analysis 
 of the origin and qualities of the peculiarities we name 
 identity or individuality, shows that they are due solely to 
 the accidents of Life-incarnation. Individuality the path- 
 ologic variety of carnivora is a disagreeable consequence 
 of a great difficulty, the outcome of the stringent condi- 
 tions matter places upon Life. Corporeal beauty illustrates 
 the same law. A beautiful face is one free from marring 
 imperfections, and vividly expressive of life. " Homeliness " 
 results from individuality of feature, imbalance and insub- 
 ordination of parts, incoordinations and imperfections of 
 incarnation. Character and personality become beautiful 
 only in so far as they approach perfection that is, in so far 
 as they are unindividual. Individuality consists in selfish-
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 127 
 
 ness, peculiarity, and imperfections. The more one is 
 greedy for personal immortality the less he merits it, the 
 less he has worthy of eternal perpetuation. Great minds 
 and good hearts are not worried about their personal iden- 
 tity and after-death continuance. They know they cannot 
 help continuing not however as singing automatons or 
 bundles of imperfections and desires, but as the common 
 life that lives outside the laws of time and space. Love of 
 individuality is love of self, and of separateness from the 
 source of all life. The truest religion seeks freedom from 
 self and union with the overstanding life. One must lose his 
 life to find it. The common belief in immortality is the 
 voice of the impudence and control of matter. It is 
 the machine asserting superiority over the mechanic and 
 the engineer. The only permanency and enduring unity 
 of an animal organism consists in the life or logos-will that 
 made and upholds it, not in the stream of matter ever fly- 
 ing through it. Individuality inheres in and is begotten of 
 organization ; when organization ends individuality ends, 
 though the life that created organization by no means ends. 
 The Basis of Ethics and Religion consists simply in 
 this fact that I have been illustrating, the fact of Life's 
 purposes and will struggling against the difficulties of 
 incarnation. Right conduct consists in adopting Life's 
 plans as our own, and working with and for her. Most of 
 the sin and wrong and suffering come from the obstinacy, 
 the over-control of matter, the imperfect incarnation of Life, 
 and the sacrifices she has to make to succeed at all. If 
 we aid her we are good ; if we side with matter we sin. 
 The principle cleaves straight through all doubtful questions 
 of casuistry and conduct, and offers a touchstone of infalli- 
 ble certainty and clearness. Every ethical rule or the 
 judgment of any specific act brought to this tribunal is 
 settled with swift accuracy. It decides peremptorily, 
 smashing many a fond and cherished conventionalism and
 
 128 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 legalized injustice, elevating to honor many quiet and 
 ignored sources and principles of right. A thousand 
 illustrations that must be passed by here, at once flash 
 before the eyes. The principle holds as true and unfailing 
 in questions of religion. No love was possible to a sup- 
 posed omniscient and omnipotent deity ; but with the 
 struggling Life of our life we can feel a kinship and 
 sympathy. If our adoption of Life's will as our own be 
 vivified by fervent love, the fulness of religion is ours, and 
 we are in veriest fact the Sons of God. Sonship, of course, 
 presupposes the brotherhood of all men nay more, of all 
 organic forms. The absorbing interest of the civilized 
 world in evolution and biologic study is but a forerunner 
 of the great recognition and atonement that must follow. 
 We are beginning to hear the whispering that is by and by 
 to become an ever-sounding voice, the faint, long-ignored 
 calling, swelling to command, of the Father of Life and of 
 forgotten brothers Tat twam asi! This art Thou ! 
 
 Pessimism and Optimism. The acknowledgment of 
 the spirituality and fatherhood of life has been stifled by 
 the unscientific inference that any such admission carried 
 with it the sweeping belief in the omnipotence and omni- 
 science of God. It has been keenly felt that the very 
 brutal fact that " the creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain " was not to be blinked and not to be reconciled with 
 the belief in an omnipotent deity. As the old antithesis 
 put it, either God doesn't wish to stop evil and pain, or He 
 can't." In either case He is not God. There is absolutely 
 no escape from that logic. Hence men preferred to believe 
 in the nonspirituality of life rather than, accepting it, to 
 be forced also to accept the absurd dogma of the omnipo- 
 tent goodness of the father of life. Thus was born the 
 modern doctrine of materialism ; thus sane, educated men, 
 closing their eyelids that they may not see, pretend to 
 believe that " life is a function of matter," etc. Many now
 
 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 129 
 
 suppose it is the tradition of Science, and that to be a 
 " scientific " man is to be a materialist. Many a dupe of 
 this kind has, like Hannibal, bound himself by an oath 
 before its import could be understood, and goes blindly 
 forward, bravely devoting fine powers of mind to a hopeless 
 and doomful task. To them the Cato of a truer philosophy 
 must ever thunder in their ears the fateful fiat of a greater 
 Rome, Delenda Carthago! The whole position is the 
 simple result of what the logicians call a non sequitur. The 
 belief in the spirituality of life does not at all necessitate 
 any belief in its omniscience, its omnipotence, or even in 
 its absolute goodness. Even the most pious of men have 
 been forced to disbelieve in the omniscience a palpably 
 absurd dogma. To this may be willingly added the admis- 
 sion that boundless goodness and omniscience do not 
 exactly sautent aux yeux, when we contemplate the history 
 of past men and animals. Had Life been altogether 
 beneficent, poison-bags, tusks, bloodshed, and the degrad- 
 ing bestiality of the struggle for existence, would not have 
 been so conspicuous and characteristic features of past and 
 present life as is evident. Even had Life been omniscient 
 without omnipotence or goodness, it would seem that her 
 ingenuity might have avoided much of these as wasteful 
 and useless. 
 
 Thus the acknowledgment of the independence and im- 
 materiality of life argues nothing as to the goodness or 
 non-goodness of that life. Neither the Christian nor any 
 religious faith gains a jot or tittle thereby. The question 
 of optimism or pessimism yet remains. Rome may have 
 been worse than Carthage, but Rome was the conquering 
 fact. The final question at issue between Schopenhauer 
 and Hegel is in no wise touched. But the question be- 
 tween Plato and Biichner is eternally settled. Hegel's 
 optimism may be wrong, but the immaterial Aoyo? certainly 
 exists, and we are its creations and mouthpieces. Scho- 
 
 12
 
 130 LIFE AND ITS PHYSICAL BASIS. 
 
 penhauer's pessimism may be unjustified, but der Wille is 
 the heart and soul of us. It might be better if materialism 
 were true, but it is not true. Science seeks to know what 
 is, not what ought to be. No profound mind would deny 
 the facts that pitying Buddha and pitiless Schopenhauer 
 have laid bare. The awful steel of Fate and suffering has 
 sunk deeply into our hearts and no divine Surgeon comes 
 to extract it. The divinest Surgeon that ever lived, in 
 uttering the saddest words ever spoken, acknowledged the 
 poisoned iron in his own breast. Eli, Eli, lamina sabachthani. 
 Like this great Healer, and his elder brother Buddha, the 
 pain must not cloud our intellect and turn it into a jug- 
 gling instrument of revengeful untruthfulness. 
 
 Following the light of reason, we may catch a gleam of 
 consolation. Perhaps there will yet be a perfect divine 
 physician. The certainty of a common, universal, -self- 
 existent, and supernatural life, functional as the heart and 
 essence of all organic beings, makes us secure in the pre- 
 servation of our true self. Individuality and personal 
 identity undesirable accidents of our organization and 
 materiality we are happily not doomed to inherit, but a 
 progressive immortality of soul seems more certain than 
 the fleeting mortality of sense, that for a day and as a 
 child's toy has pleased and deluded us.
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE?* 
 
 The reproach that medicine has not kept step with the 
 general scientific progress of the age, is one so commonly 
 made that it has doubtless often been accepted as a truism 
 by many who in other matters exercise a more discriminat- 
 ing judgment. On the part of those who know the facts, 
 there is, of course, not the slightest question that medicine 
 is scientific in the best and highest meaning of the word. 
 How the query arises is easily explained when one con- 
 siders the erroneousness of the common conception of the 
 term science, the failure to provide the means of proper 
 physiologic knowledge in our plans of primary education, 
 the deplorable condition of medical education, and, lastly, 
 the ignorance of what modern scientific medicine has done 
 and is doing. 
 
 The last point seems the most important, and in consider- 
 ing it one must not forget that so fast as a more or less 
 clearly-circumscribed department of medicine has grown 
 precise and scientific, it has as a specialty taken a position 
 of semiindependence. The world thinks only of the 
 remaining undifferentiated part, called general or internal 
 medicine, as being distinctly medical ; and forgets that the 
 specialties, which have almost reached the limit of possible 
 scientific extension and accuracy, are very essential parts 
 of medicine, themselves the samples and pledges of coming 
 progress in all. Thus in surgery, ophthalmology, obstet- 
 rics, dentistry, otology, dermatology, etc., there is on the 
 
 * From The Forum of Dec., 1889.
 
 132 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 part of competent physicians no considerable difference as 
 to diagnosis and treatment in a given case ; and the reduc- 
 tion of the mortality from diseases belonging to these de- 
 partments is proof of that systematization and accuracy 
 which we call scientific. 
 
 *It is well known that the application of bacteriologic 
 study to surgery, obstetrics, etc., has in important respects 
 revolutionized them. Surgical, hospital, and puerperal 
 fevers are now almost things of the past. Twenty years 
 ago it was not uncommon for the mortality of puerperal 
 septicemia to mount as high as 30, and even 50 per cent. 
 It is to-day less than one per cent. The same explanation 
 is to be given as regards the successfulness of the modern 
 Cesarean section. The science of pelvimetry has also 
 saved the lives of many children and mothers. Ophthal- 
 mology is perhaps the most exact of the medical sciences, 
 and even if no prophylaxis of cataract be ever found, the 
 restoration of vision in 95 per cent, of cataract operations 
 is a decisive proof of excellent work. But perhaps a still 
 greater beneficence is to come from stifling the most fertile 
 source of reflex neuroses the headaches, dyspepsias, 
 choreas, etc., so often due to " eye-strain." 
 
 If one thoroughly conversant with the medical progress 
 of the last few years, take up even the best work on path- 
 ology or general medicine issued five or ten years ago, he 
 is astonished to find how much seems old and outgrown. 
 The stupendous discoveries and advances made from day to 
 day, cause the book before the last to seem like history 
 rather than present-day conclusions. Any attempt even at 
 the briefest resume of these wonderful labors, even if it did 
 not presuppose an encyclopedic erudition, would, in the 
 space allowed me, be impossible. To the general reader, 
 moreover, it would be very dry reading. There are but few 
 " choice souls " who find a book-catalogue interesting read- 
 ing, though every line may suggest the enthusiasms and
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 133 
 
 labors of years, and, in a way, be fraught with profound 
 import. All, therefore, that can be done, is to glance at a 
 few of the most salient points and aspects of modern scien- 
 tific medicine, which may serve as illustrations of that spirit 
 of science and progress which is working in and through 
 it all. 
 
 No other discovery has aroused so great hopes, and none 
 has so superbly satisfied many of them, as that of the ex- 
 istence and disease-producing influence of the minute 
 organisms called bacteria, microbes, or microorganisms. 
 Their pathogenic influence is now established beyond con- 
 troversy, and to this discovery is due the revolutionizing of 
 surgery, the extinction of surgical and puerperal fever, etc. 
 Indeed, every department of medicine has been electrified 
 by the partial success and perfect promise that it holds out. 
 I had prepared a table of the different orders of these 
 " disease-germs " that have been studied, showing their 
 methods of "cultivation," habitat, nature, peculiarities, and 
 pathogenic influences, but it is too extended to transcribe 
 here. A glimpse may be gained of the hordes of invisible 
 enemies that may live upon or within us, from the mere 
 numbers of the principal species. From the latest data that 
 I can find, my summary shows 76 distinct species of bacil- 
 lus, 50 of micrococcus, 20 of spirillum, 8 of sarcina, 6 of 
 beggiatoa, and one each of leuconostoc, astococcus, lepto- 
 thrix, cladothrix,and crenothrix 165 in all. Of this num- 
 ber especially frightful if we consider their tremendous 
 power of multiplication some are almost certainly harm- 
 less, while yet another portion is doubtfully pathogenic. 
 But some 43 varieties of micrococcus, 30 of bacillus, 4 of 
 spirillum, and one of leptothrix are certainly connected 
 directly or indirectly with human diseases. Among the 
 principal of these are the pyogenic or pus-forming bacteria, 
 with which the surgeon has chiefly to do, numbering 8 
 principal varieties. Other orders of micrococcus believed to
 
 134 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 be associated with disease, are the micrococcus of erysipelas, 
 Aleppo boil, pneumonia, mammitis, diphtheria, scarlatina, 
 smallpox, measles, yellow fever, gonorrhea, and possibly 
 of hydrophobia. Among the pathogenic bacilli, the more 
 noteworthy are those of anthrax, tuberculosis, green diar- 
 rhea of children, diphtheria, epidemic dysentery, leprosy, 
 glanders, and typhoid. The spirillum of cholera (or 
 comma bacillus) is the most important of the spirilla. I 
 have attempted no enumeration of the diseases that perhaps 
 over-enthusiastic discoverers believe due to microorgan- 
 isms. Even such unlikely types as cancer and tetanus are 
 confidently claimed. There is, of course, much indefinite- 
 ness, even doubt, as to the etiologic role they play. The 
 study is attended by extraordinary difficulties, and is 
 liable to induce confusion. Post hoc is doubtless frequently 
 mistaken for propter hoc, and much extravagance of claim 
 must be set over against the dead weight of an extreme 
 conservatism. 
 
 The investigation of the laws of these microbes gives 
 entrancing, though also tantalizing, glimpses into many 
 mysteries. One such is the theory of malarial or intermit- 
 tent fevers, to be described later. The immunity given by 
 one attack of an infectious disease, is explained as due to 
 the appearance, during the first attack, of certain products 
 that render the tissues and cells more hardy and resistant 
 to subsequent attacks we explain everything nowadays 
 by habit, or organic memory. This fact, coupled with its 
 complement, the attenuation of a virus, or modification of 
 its virulence, by passing through the system of another 
 animal, serves to make clear how, for example, one attack 
 of smallpox usually gives immunity from a second, and 
 how the attenuated virus, or cow pox, does the same. 
 Either calls out the resistance of the cells that have learned 
 skill in one encounter, and know their enemy by experience. 
 In a certain sense, the invasion of the organism by bacteria
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 135 
 
 is a sort of intimate traumatism or inner violence, whose 
 injury the inherent powers of the organism must resist or 
 heal. The bacterial origin of the infectious diseases reduces 
 at a stroke the catalogue of true idiopathic, autogenetic, or 
 self-produced diseases, and our conception of the dignity 
 and heroism of the organism at once rises. Its warfare 
 against innumerable invisible foes commands our sympa- 
 thetic respect. It would seem that all the body's foes 
 come from without. If such a disease as cancer be of 
 bacterial origin, it is probable that any other disease may 
 be, and the dream of an elixir of life would be realized if 
 we could keep all microbes outside and observe the laws 
 of hygiene. 
 
 The infective diseases are the principal disease-causers 
 and death-producers of the world, and all are quite certainly 
 bound up with the transfer of specific bacteria or poisons 
 from one organism to another. The profound, almost sole, 
 lesson of prophylaxis and preventive medicine, is the 
 avoidance of contamination. Phthisis, the most fatal of all 
 diseases, causing one death out of every eight, is now 
 proved to be contagious. Its inception depends upon the 
 passage of the living bacillus from one organism to 
 another. When this is prevented the dread affection will 
 no longer mow down its millions. Its prevention seems 
 easy, and by two feasible simple means : the devitalization 
 of the sputum of consumptive patients, as the desiccated 
 tubercle bacillus still maintains its vitality ; and the legal 
 control and inspection of all dairies and of the slaughtering 
 of animals, so that tuberculous meat or milk shall not be 
 sold. There is now no doubt that bovine and human 
 phthisis is the same disease, due to the same microorganism ; 
 and that the transfer of the latter to man, by the ingestion 
 of tuberculous meat and milk, is a common cause of 
 human phthisis. Dr. Behrens regards the exceptional 
 freedom of the Jewish people from phthisis, and its low
 
 136 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 mortality, as due to religious rules concerning the choice 
 and killing of cattle and the sale of meat. 
 
 Up to the present time, it must be confessed that bac- 
 teriologic studies have not brought out therapeutic meas- 
 ures to equal the etiologic importance ascribed to the 
 microorganism. To the patient attacked with infectious 
 disease, the thing of all importance is not prevention, but 
 cure. The enemy is intrenched. The great aim now is to 
 find some agent that will reach and kill the bacterium 
 without killing the organ or tissue in which it is secreted. 
 Many indications, and indeed many successes, foreshow 
 that we are upon the eve of brilliant victories, in this re- 
 spect, and the avid ingenuity of a thousand delvers is at 
 work upon the problem. What honor too great for the 
 discoverer of such an agent? All may end in disappoint- 
 ment, and the world be thrown back upon prevention alone. 
 But if this be effective, it is, of course, all that is desired. 
 To annihilate the ultimate causes that produce disease, or 
 to inhibit their action, is better than numberless cures to- 
 day, that must be repeated to-morrow. 
 
 Another new field of research that is at present most 
 industriously worked, is that of the substances called pto- 
 mains and leukomains, the first being chemic, alkaloidal 
 substances, formed by or during the putrefaction of nitro- 
 genous organic materials; the second, similar products 
 formed within the living body by tissue-metamorphosis or 
 bacterial agency. There have been isolated and studied 
 some 40 or more ptomains and unnamed bases, of which 
 about 25 have toxic or injurious effects ; and 16 leukomains 
 and unnamed bases. The nature and actions of the latter 
 remain largely hidden, owing to the evident fact that their 
 isolation is rendered almost impossible. 
 
 The unity of all true science is illustrated by the fact 
 that these substances, at first seemingly disconnected from 
 bacteriologic study and relationship, are now seen to be
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 137 
 
 most intimately bound up with bacterial life and action. It 
 is half-proved that the bacterium does its mischief, or much 
 of it, by the direct or indirect production of these alkaloidal 
 poisons. The method, and even the fact, is not sufficiently 
 definite to admit of a very clear exposition. The influence 
 of these products upon the tissues, together with the re- 
 action the habitual or acquired resistance of the tissues 
 to the same constitutes the immunity of which I have 
 spoken, acquired by the first attack of a contagious disease, 
 or by the inoculation of attenuated virus. A most promis- 
 ing outlook is also found in the discovery that immunity 
 is gained in some diseases, and perhaps in many, by the 
 inoculation of purely chemical, or artificial synthetic, sub- 
 stances. The thought, like so many, is brilliant with pos- 
 sibilities that make us wish to see what the next few years 
 may bring forth. A beautiful illustration of the possible 
 method of action and reaction between the bacterium and 
 leukomain, is the theory of malarial and intermittent fevers 
 a theory, indeed, that rests upon a pretty firm basis of 
 probability and justifiable inference. It is well known that 
 bacteria in culture media often develop some substance 
 that stops their growth, and that they die, as it were, in 
 their own poison. It is supposed that the malarial micro- 
 organism does the same in the blood, and that the remis- 
 sion, or intermission, stage of the disease corresponds to 
 the period when the circulating bacteria have been drowned 
 or paralyzed by their self-produced poison. The stage of 
 the return of the fever is synchronous with the revivifica- 
 tion of the microbes, or with a fresh invasion of new armies 
 from' the spleen and lymphatics. 
 
 Thus, again and again are we brought back to the con- 
 clusion that in aim and in fact medicine is becoming pre- 
 ventive. Every discovery, even in therapeutics, seems to 
 bear in its hand the motto, Prophylaxis is the best cure. 
 It is not that great and invaluable discoveries of healing
 
 138 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 agents are not constantly being made. The nobler aim 
 and the manifest destiny of a far-sighted prevention be- 
 come necessarily dominant ideals. The brilliant results of 
 vaccination are illustration and proof. Of all pitiable 
 bigots the antivaccinationists are assuredly the finest speci- 
 mens. In England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies, the smallpox mortality was from 4,000 to 5,000 per 
 million deaths. In 1887 it was nine! The decline in the 
 death-rate during the gradual extension of vaccination, 
 whilst marked for all ages combined, has been almost ex- 
 clusively among children. Since 1847, in children below 
 five, it has fallen 80 per cent. The immunity conferred is, 
 therefore, in the earlier, and hence most valuable, period. 
 Taking the mortality at all ages, the death-rate from small- 
 pox has fallen 49 per cent., while that from other causes 
 has fallen seven per cent. In the London Smallpox Hos- 
 pital, in the past twenty- five years, out of 6,000 cases 
 occurring after vaccination, Mr. Marson finds that the per- 
 centage of those stated to have been vaccinated, but having 
 no cicatrix, was 21^ ; with one vaccine cicatrix, 7^ ; with 
 two, 4*^j ; with three, i^; with four or more, ^. For 
 comparison, the deaths of the unvaccinated were 35^ per 
 cent. Of 10,403 cases of smallpox treated in the metro- 
 politan hospitals, the deaths of the " vaccinated, with good 
 marks," were 3 per cent. ; of the " vaccinated, with imper- 
 fect marks," 9 per cent. ; of the " vaccinated, but with no 
 evidence of the same," 27 per cent.; of the " unvaccinated," 
 43 per cent. In the face of such facts, even cranks and 
 fools should learn, or be most summarily taught, the les- 
 son of silence. 
 
 In the same, though possibly in a less striking, way, there 
 has been a noteworthy advance " all along the line," so 
 that there is now no subject of medical study that does not 
 bear witness to the spirit of accurate and exhaustive 
 research that characterizes our age. New drugs and thera-
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 139 
 
 peutic agents are sought with eagerness and found where 
 they would least be expected. The very refuse of coal- oil 
 refineries is wonderfully enriching our materia medica. 
 Every substance, whether organic or inorganic, that may 
 possibly influence the animal economy for good or ill, has 
 been repeatedly tested by manifold timed and guarded 
 experiments upon animals, and finally upon the human 
 being, until its powers are determined with the precision 
 required in the case of a new explosive, or the torsion 
 balance. Occasionally there is a sadly ludicrous side to 
 this feverish eagerness, and duped over-confidence finds 
 itself landed in the quagmire of an elixir dream. But the 
 trained intelligence and massive strength of the great body 
 of the profession smiles at such sorry delusions, and calmly 
 pushes forward to predestined victory. 
 
 Simply to enumerate the larger incidents of the ad- 
 vance would require a volume, not a page. The finally 
 convincing proof is the work done. By its fruits must 
 any work be judged. Let us, finally, glance at statis- 
 tics. Nothing is definitely known unless one method 
 of the knowledge be numerical. " The ' sometimes ' of 
 the cautious is the 'often' of the sanguine, the 'always' 
 of the empiric, and the ' never ' of the skeptic ; but the 
 numbers I, 10, 100, 10,000, have only one meaning for 
 all mankind." In 1861-70 the English death-rate from the 
 seven chief zymotic diseases smallpox, measles, scarlet 
 fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, fever (typhus, ty- 
 phoid, continued, etc.), and diarrheal diseases was 4.248 
 per IOOO living. In 1887 it was 2.385 very little more 
 than one half! Whether a science or not, it is plain that 
 medicine has, in this aspect, and in England alone, saved 
 over 67,000 lives. A remarkable instance is the class called 
 fevers, the number of deaths from which in twenty-five 
 years has been reduced from about 20,000 a year to 5,873. 
 
 Despite the general carelessness caused by the prevalent
 
 140 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 belief in the noncontagiousness of phthisis and by the use 
 of tuberculous milk and meat, in England from 1850 to 
 1880 there has been a reduction in the number of deaths 
 from this dread disease amounting to 327 per million. But 
 the death-rate for other respiratory diseases has remained 
 the same a fact that is in truth a cause for congratulation, 
 when it is remembered that the urbanization of all England 
 that has gone on during this period, together with the 
 unhealthy commercial and manufacturing slavery of the 
 masses, would doubtless have doubled the mortality, had not 
 Medicine and her handmaid, Sanitation, been everywhere 
 heriocally at work to forefend and to save. In the same 
 way is to be explained the increase in the death-rate for 
 diabetes, chronic renal affections, and nervous diseases, due 
 to the intensity of the mental strain and worry of modern 
 commercial and fashionable life. That the death-rate has 
 not been trebled, is to the credit of scientific medicine. 
 
 The decline of the entire English death-rate summarizes 
 the whole matter for us. Within one hundred years that 
 of all Europe has fallen from 34 per 1000 living to about 20, 
 and that of England to 18.5.* The death-rate of the 
 English army has been reduced by more than one-half 
 within the century. In the strict census-taking period, the 
 mortality of English males has been reduced 2.88 per cent, 
 and of females, 7.62 per cent. This adds about one and 
 one-half years to the average life of males and three to 
 that of females. Or, according to Dr. Ogle, a million 
 males will live 1,439,139 additional years, and a million 
 females, 2,777,584 years. Each year, there is thus placed 
 to the credit of each average million of the new-born a life 
 surplus of about two million years. Has the community, 
 then, no debt of gratitude to the medical profession ? 
 
 * The death-rate of Brooklyn and New York, which should be far lower 
 than that of London, is far higher. If it were only equal, there would be an 
 annual saving of 16,000 lives, and 32,000 years of sickness.
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 141 
 
 If we take the debit and credit of each disease, we get 
 the following table : 
 
 ANNUAL DEATHS PER MILLION LIVING IN TWO DECENNIA. 
 
 CAUSE OF DEATH. 
 
 1861-70. 
 
 1871-80. 
 
 ANNUAL 
 
 INCREASE OR 
 DECREASE IN 
 1871-80. 
 
 
 163 
 
 236 
 
 + 73 
 
 Measles, 
 
 44 
 
 378 
 
 62 
 
 Scarlet fever, 
 
 972 
 
 716 
 
 256 
 
 
 185 
 
 121 
 
 64 
 
 Whooping cough, 
 
 527 
 
 512 
 
 15 
 
 Fever, 
 
 885 
 
 484 
 
 401 
 
 Diarrheal diseases, 
 
 1,076 
 
 935 
 
 141 
 
 Cancer, 
 
 387 
 
 47"? 
 
 + 86 
 
 Phthisis, 
 
 2,475 
 
 2,116 
 
 T>9 
 
 Hydrocephalus, 
 
 347 
 
 317 
 
 3O 
 
 Other tubercular diseases, .... 
 Diseases of the nervous system, 
 " " circulatory system 
 and dropsy, . . 
 " " respiratory system, 
 " " digestive system, . 
 " " urinary system, 
 Puerperal fever, childbirth, . . . 
 Violence, 
 
 437 
 
 2,785 
 
 i,349 
 3.3 6 4 
 981 
 298 
 165 
 765 
 
 445 
 2,770 
 
 1,477 
 3,76o 
 978 
 392 
 167 
 733 
 
 + 8 
 *5 
 
 + 128 
 +396 
 3 
 + 94 
 + 2 
 32 
 
 All other and unstated causes, . . 
 
 4,8i5 
 
 4,262 
 
 553 
 
 All causes 
 
 22,416 
 
 21,272 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Balance of decrease, 
 
 
 
 I 144. 
 
 
 
 
 
 The figures are not to be had for the past ten years, in 
 which a marvelous and continuous decline in the death-rate 
 is still in progress. If we estimate that 1,500 lives per 
 million are being saved the English people by medical 
 science and sanitary legislation, we get a grand total of 
 saved lives of over 50,000 a year, and therefore find this 
 single people richer in twenty years by more than a mil 
 lion people. As nowadays we estimate everything in terms 
 of money, we may apply that method to life itself; and 
 taking Dr. Farr's low estimate of the worth of an English 
 life, the mean net value of the phenomenon called an agri- 
 cultural laborer ($750), we should by this " buyer's appraise- 
 ment " have a saving of something less than a thousand
 
 142 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 
 
 millions of dollars. But what valuation could be made of 
 the lives of such men as Bessemer and Darwin, supposing 
 them not among the saved ? English statistics have been 
 made the basis of illustration, but scientific medicine has 
 penetrated into all civilized countries among six hundred 
 millions of people. Supposing that the saving of life and 
 sickness in other countries has been but one-half that in 
 England, we have yet to multiply all our figures by ten. 
 
 But the account is not yet closed. Dr. Farr estimates 
 that for every annual death, two persons are on an aver- 
 age suffering continuously from sickness. At the lowest 
 rating there are two years of severe illness to every death. 
 If therefore, according to the previous calculation, 1,500 
 English lives are saved each year, 3,000 years of sickness 
 are also annually saved. Even this tremendous saving 
 may be multiplied many times by including the number- 
 less and unknown, but certainly existing, cases where dis- 
 ease is aborted, cured, or prevented by the skill that gives 
 back to the healthy class persons who without treatment 
 might not have died, but who would have permanently 
 passed into the class of those maimed, crippled, or weak- 
 ened by chronic or partially-overcome disease. In such 
 regions as these, money considerations are as much out of 
 place as to talk of buying a sunset ; and though it might 
 be frankly admitted that as a business the medical profes- 
 sion would be pleased to take as a compensation ten per 
 cent, of what it saves society, it assuredly infinitely prefers 
 intelligent cooperation and esteem. That profession alone 
 at the present time offers the spectacle of a large, compact, 
 self-conscious body of men, driven by no bigotry or zeal- 
 otry or tempestuous Zeitgeist, working with eagerness, 
 determination, and almost the assurance of success, toward 
 its own undoing toward the annihilation of its means of 
 subsistence, and its very existence. It may be that disease 
 will never be eliminated from human life ; but none are 
 prouder than medical men of their partial success in this ;
 
 IS MEDICINE A SCIENCE? 143 
 
 none more elated over the prospect that now seems almost 
 assured, of striking a final death-blow at the root of all 
 contagious diseases, or those which cause the vast major- 
 ity of all death and sickness. In this highest of all human 
 offices they ask only sympathetic help. They, too, are 
 certainly bearing their share of the present burden of the 
 world's unfortunate and overloaded. It is hardly an ex- 
 aggeration to say that for a full half of its present daily 
 service, it not only asks no pay, but is glad and proud of 
 its spontaneous charity. Every physician treats the poor 
 free of charge, and in nearly every square of all our cities 
 dispensatories and hospitals are found where the best and 
 highest medical service is at the disposal of all without 
 charge. Medicine is thus not only a science but it is an 
 art ; not only an art but a moral system and almost a re- 
 ligion. Is there, has there ever been, another such unself- 
 ish work done outside the religious faiths ? Take the law 
 for comparison, and, except in rare and exceptional cases, 
 can a poor factory girl or workman get from analogous 
 legal institutions talent for his defense, and, by its aid, jus- 
 tice before the law, without first laying down a handsome 
 retainer? Even with the most just of causes, unless the 
 money at stake be immense in amount, is it not wiser to 
 allow injustice to rule, than to seek redress in a modern 
 court of equity ? What is the appreciation shown the science 
 of medicine? One instance only need be given as an 
 answer. In the so-called medical center of the United 
 States, $20,000,000 is spent to construct a palace, rich with 
 marbles and carvings, largely for the use and behoof of 
 ward politicians ; but never a thousandth part of such 
 an amount to endow an institution of medical education, 
 sanitary research, or preventive medicine things certain 
 to repay, even in dollar-values, a thousand-fold, and in 
 health progress and beneficence, incalculable blessings 
 throughout coming time !
 
 THE DUTY OF THE COMMUNITY TO 
 MEDICAL SCIENCE.* 
 
 I cannot say that I have had any personal experience as 
 regards the difficulty, but it is stated that an intelligent and 
 duteous rich man, by reason of his mental vision and con- 
 scientiousness, finds no problem so hard of solution as that 
 of disposing of his wealth without doing injury to the in- 
 dividual legatee or to the general community. There are 
 but few " charities " so carefully and judiciously established 
 that a cold intelligence does not find them productive of as 
 much harm as good, and there are many that are fountains 
 of almost unadulterated evil. The most grievous crimes 
 of many "good" men are frequently their wills those 
 very documents in which the devisors seek to make some 
 atonement for the sins of wealth-gathering by the uncon- 
 scious sin of wealth-scattering. There should be a book of 
 instruction written on this subject, setting forth the science 
 of endowing without damning. Millionaires are such com- 
 mon, every-day folk that they should be instructed and 
 trained in that excellent art, so little taught, so little prac- 
 tised the art how not to make an ass of one's self. I have 
 read somewhere of a spinster of advanced years, bearing 
 a secret grudge against the government for taxing her, 
 triumphantly considering that on her death-bed she had 
 " got even " with the United States treasury by burning 
 her whole fortune of government bonds. Many bequests 
 
 * A paper read before the American Academy of Medicine at its meeting in 
 Milwaukee, June 3, 1893. From the Bulletin of the American Academy of 
 Medicine, No. 16 
 
 144
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 145 
 
 are quite as wise and still more harmful. There is a 
 strange fatality, a subtle waywardness in institutions, 
 whereby they insensibly drift away from the plan of 
 founders, and in a few years are seen to be increasing the 
 very evil they were meant to check. There is in this an 
 historic sarcasm, a divine irony that tells the impertinent 
 philanthropist that it is of no use to give unless he gives 
 wisely. In charity, sentiment alone is not to be trusted. 
 It is only intellect that transforms benevolence into benefi- 
 cence. And this is simply because benevolence seeks only 
 alleviation and the annulling of effects, whilst it is only the 
 intellect that tells how to stop causes, and thus end the en- 
 tire generation of effects. 
 
 The object of this writing is to encourage medical men 
 by every means in their power to spread abroad through- 
 out the community the knowledge of a truth, awful in its 
 significance, and absolute in its application, a truth of 
 which legislators and philanthropists are outrageously 
 ignorant or scornful the truth that there is no duty so 
 imperative and no self-interest so evident as the duty and 
 the self-interest of the endowment of institutions of pre- 
 ventive and didactic medicine. When the power-squander- 
 ing legislator or the wealth-squandering capitalist falls ill, 
 the first thing he does is to call a physician to rescue him 
 from death. Power and wealth would he gladly give for 
 health and lengthened life. But he does not then ask 
 himself if he or his fellows have given a word or a dollar 
 to enable that physician to discover the causes, and thus 
 to prevent the existence of disease in the abstract. And 
 neither by word nor deed has he done anything to help 
 that physician to outfit himself with the knowledge and 
 experience necessary to deal successfully with his own in- 
 dividual ailment. We should, therefore, by iteration and 
 reiteration pound it into the brains of these silly folk that 
 such a proceeding is simply a lack of foresight, a failure in 
 13
 
 146 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 simple prudence. In financial matters they know enough 
 to create sinking funds and prepare for coming drafts and 
 liquidations, but they are ignorant of the most palpable 
 self-interest in the matter of the financial value of life and 
 health, and the dire expense of disease and death. It is 
 the duty of the Academy to teach financiers some financial 
 good sense. 
 
 Dr. Bayard Holmes tells us that the productive funds 
 of the theologic schools of the country amount to seven- 
 teen or eighteen millions of dollars, whilst those of the 
 medical schools amount to about one-half of one million. 
 I have no sympathy with those who would scorn the value 
 or belittle the dignity of the science of theology. But in 
 all candor what egregious injustice and imprudence, finan- 
 cial imprudence of the most literal sort, does not this fact 
 show up ? Personifying the community as an investor of 
 capital does he not really exhibit a mad-house economic 
 science? Which yields the best mundane and cash inter- 
 est, the investment in M. D.'s, or that in D. D.'s ? Jenner 
 saves the community more dollars in one year than all 
 the endowments of all the theologic schools of all time. 
 Behold the financial wisdom of the world that makes an 
 investment thirty-five times as great in heavenly stocks 
 that have never declared a single earthly dividend, as the 
 stingy subscription in a company that infallibly divides an 
 enormous per cent, profit in hard cash every year ! It is 
 agreed that within a few years medical science has length- 
 ened the average life some three or four years. This pro- 
 portionately postpones and lessens the number of funerals 
 and funeral processions, does it not? Well, now how 
 much do you suppose the community pays the under- 
 takers and the liverymen ? The saving in cab hire to the 
 community from these postponed funerals would alone 
 richly endow every medical school in the land ! This is a 
 reductio ad absurdum of a peculiar sort, but isn't it literally
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 147 
 
 true? We are compelled to this kind of argument to 
 arouse the attention of our remarkable democratic investor. 
 Gratitude for the saved life and the postponed death we do 
 not expect Lord Demos has no love for his medical 
 friends but we do wish we might have this saving in cab 
 fares wherewith to endow a dozen hygienic institutes, a 
 score of bacteriologic laboratories, and two score of medical 
 schools. 
 
 Behold plainly the necessary results of not endowing 
 schools of preventive and didactic medicine : 
 
 I. The putting of the most precious thing in the world, 
 health and life itself, in the hands of men uneducated either 
 as regards general literature and science, or as regards 
 medicine. No one of us indeed, not one of the poor 
 fellows himself so dumped into the community has any- 
 thing but pity and scorn for the medical outfitting of a man 
 who is compelled to take charge of seriously ill patients, 
 without general preliminary training, and with only ten 
 or a dozen months of medical theoretic study. What an 
 outrageous mockery ! After many years of profound study 
 and experience a schooled mind feels most poignantly the 
 inadequacy of known science and the bootlessness of rich 
 experience to deal with the unfathomable mysteries of 
 disease. It takes half a lifetime to learn how not to make 
 useless mistakes. But to take a boy so untrained that he 
 can't spell correctly any five Anglo-Saxon words, and after 
 a few months' lecture-taking and mnemonic cramming to 
 place in his hands the awful responsibility of the life and 
 health of hundreds or thousands surely this is a farce 
 worthy only of our civilized barbarism. 
 
 To illustrate, let me show you a printed sheet containing 
 a student's notes on the differential diagnosis of four 
 varieties of tumors. It needs to be remembered that the 
 student making the notes was about to graduate in 1893, 
 and that the school in which he studied makes much of its
 
 148 
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 preliminary entrance examinations. The young man was 
 an amateur printer. He set up the type himself, corrected 
 the proof, and himself printed off a number of copies for 
 the use of his classmates. 
 
 ENCEPHALOID. 
 
 1 Soft elastic not uniformly so 
 
 2 Groth Rapid Large 
 
 3 Adhesions, Earley and Slight 
 
 4 Pane, Wandering until ulceration 
 
 then fixed and servere 
 
 5 Veins Large 
 
 6 Foul ulcer fungating edges ex- 
 
 curvaled undermined much 
 bleding 
 
 7 Glandular envolvement early 
 j\ Comes at any age 
 
 8 Seat, Breast, Testicles, Uteris, 
 
 Overies, Prostate and Salivery 
 glands. 
 
 9 Duration 9-12 m fatal. 
 
 10 Nipple not retracted. 
 
 1 1 Histary Bad. 
 
 SARCOMA. 
 
 1 Firm, generally irregular soft 
 
 and flucuating apperently. 
 
 2 Rapid and Slow, Groth large 
 
 size 
 
 3 Adhesions early. 
 
 4 Pane slight until, ulceration then 
 
 more 
 
 5 Veins moderate. 
 
 6 Foul ulcer, great bleeding, 
 
 7 Glandular envolvement late. 
 7 1 Any age. 
 
 8 Seat connective tisue extremities 
 
 of bones periosteum, brest. 
 
 9 Long duration before fatal 
 
 10 Nipple not retracted. 
 
 1 1 History good. 
 
 SCHIRRUS. 
 
 1 Hard, inelastic. 
 
 2 Groth, Moderate and Small. 
 
 3 Adhesions, Late. 
 
 4 Pane, Earley and sharp fixed. 
 
 5 Veins, Modatly large 
 
 6 Edges, Hard thickened abrupt 
 
 little bleeding. 
 
 7 Glandular envolvement, Late. 
 ^\ after 45 X 
 
 8 Seat, breast uterus stomach rare 
 
 in overies and testies and 
 Prostat 
 
 9 Fatal 18-36 mts. 
 
 10 Retracted nipple. 
 
 1 1 History good, excema of nipple 
 
 may precid it Pagits diseas. 
 
 ADENOMA. 
 
 1 Hard elastic. 
 
 2 Growth slow. 
 
 3 Adhesions rare. 
 
 4 Pane neuralgic and menstral. 
 
 5 Veins not enlarge. 
 
 6 No Bleading 
 
 7 No glandular envolvement. 
 7 Under, 30 
 
 8 Seat, brest. 
 
 9 Not fatal. 
 
 10 Nipple not retracted. 
 
 11 History good
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 149 
 
 2. The lessening in the proportion of men studying medi- 
 cine who have had college training. Again we are indebted 
 to Dr. Holmes for his sad showing of but some fifteen per 
 cent, of such students in the United States. When a pro- 
 fession fails to attract the college-bred men, something is 
 certainly radically wrong somewhere. The wrong is 
 essentially the love of the community for quackery and 
 medical humbug, but the " somewhere " can only be more 
 definitely located as due to the general lowering of profes- 
 sional character and standards due to dumping thousands 
 of uneducated boys into the profession. 
 
 3. And the fault of the dumping process must lie with 
 the commercialization of medical teaching. Men, however, 
 must be taught in some manner and to some degree ; and, 
 with unendowed schools, the motive of teaching must be 
 as it too long has been, and too much still is, the earning 
 of money, or more commonly the making of consultation 
 practice by the fact of professional honor and position. 
 Hence the inevitable result, the necessity of graduating as 
 many students as possible, regardless of fitness or acquire- 
 ment. It thus comes about that proprietary or commer- 
 cial medical colleges do not generally willingly advance 
 the standards, either of entrance or of graduation, and they 
 lengthen the period of study only as they are forced to do 
 it by the example of university rivals or in shamed defer- 
 ence to public opinion. The rule does not hold in Buffalo, 
 doubtless in other places also, and in Philadelphia we have 
 one splendid exception to this sad law. Led by the 
 glorious example of the University of Pennsylvania and 
 fired with the pride of sex, supplemented also by a genuine 
 love of progress, our noble Woman's Medical College has 
 adopted the four years' graded course in advance of two 
 large medical schools for men. 
 
 Excellent instances are pointed out, that show proprie- 
 tary medical schools advancing the standard, and at least
 
 ISO DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 soon following the example of endowed schools in length- 
 ening the course and broadening it to meet the demands 
 of the entirely new scientific school of medicine so suddenly 
 and so lately come upon us. Such exceptions both prove 
 the law and test the rule. They are what they are despite 
 the natural tendency, and because of the dignity of charac- 
 ter of the governing and teaching body. If half a dozen 
 men own a college, absorb all its revenues and honors, 
 it is asking too much of unconverted human nature 
 to expect them to tremendously enlarge the paid teach- 
 ing body, dividing both the emoluments and fame, by 
 reorganizing the school to meet the entirely changed 
 demands of to-day. It may sometimes happen, but, alas ! 
 it may often not happen. It is nothing but opera-bouffe 
 medical education to pretend to fit modern physicians for 
 their work by a half dozen or so men talking a few hours 
 a week at a half thousand boys for two or three half years. 
 Sometimes the half dozen may be united in harmonious 
 ambition, and with dignity " tide over " the passage to a 
 better future. But sometimes, too, the plan may result in 
 making a school a hotbed of politics, of injustice to 
 alumni, and of mutual jealousies. 
 
 Possibly the dying economist thinks he is doing his 
 duty to the health of the community and to medicine by 
 the endowment of hospitals. It is, indeed, becoming 
 fashionable to endow free beds, to dance and conduct 
 lotteries, as the newspapers say, " for sweet charity's sake." 
 Some good, much good has certainly been effected in this 
 way, but it is time to modify, limit, and direct the thought- 
 less trend of sentiment before historic momentum increases 
 so much that hospitalism will become a sad disease and 
 hospital endowments will rival the wasted wealth of the 
 present day English guilds. As at present managed it is 
 useless to deny the enormity of the hospital and dispensary 
 abuses already existing, impossible to ignore the dangerous
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 151 
 
 increase thereby of popular communistic habit, to forget 
 the improvidence thus encouraged, and lastly the frightful 
 injustice to physicians as a class. If these things can not 
 be righted, the giving of money to hospitals without care- 
 ful and sharp restrictions as to uses and abuses, the weed- 
 ing out those able to pay, etc., etc., may become and has 
 even now often become a public injury rather than a 
 public benefit. 
 
 Let me illustrate how hospital endowments may be 
 utterly turned from the purpose of founders and become 
 at once engines of professional and social wrong. The 
 Coventry Provident Dispensary, of England, came into 
 existence in 1831. It now has a membership of some 
 26,000 in a population of some 50,000. The medical staff 
 numbers twenty-six. Of course in founding it, and one of 
 the founders still lives to bear witness, the intention was 
 to provide medical services for working people and those 
 who could not pay medical men. But now behold ! On 
 the ground that some of the medical staff receive small 
 salaries from the endowment funds, the government of the 
 hospital by a large majority lately passed a resolution to 
 the effect that the well-to-do and rich should be allowed 
 membership and so entitled to charity treatment as well as 
 the poor. 
 
 Much of this sort of socio-economic depravity would of 
 course soon ruin medical education and professional dignity. 
 It is high time that we as a body of men haul up sharp 
 and refuse to further aid in our own personal and profes- 
 sional self-degradation. This is a sort of suicide that can 
 arouse only pity and contempt. If we are willing to become 
 valets we are worthy to become valets. But even if we 
 are willing, society should not be willing, because every 
 gain of professional honor is so much gain for society, 
 and every loss of professional self-respect is society's 
 loss. Society, the ordinary citizen, should be more
 
 152 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 jealous of medical honor and progress than physicians 
 themselves. 
 
 But even if we left this aspect of the matter entirely by 
 side, what is hospitalism at last but pecking away at results 
 without a finger raised to shut off the everlasting produc- 
 tion of these results ? There is no need to remind phy- 
 sicians of their divine duty to heal disease, but there are 
 two other duties far more divine : The duty, first, of training 
 and fitting the physician so that he shall be capable of 
 healing disease ; and, second, the still grander duty of 
 preventing disease. To train men in the knowledge and 
 cure of disease requires an endowed college. The unen- 
 dowed institution is doomed and must be supplanted by 
 the institution that by reason of endowment is freed from 
 the mercenary dictates of its patrons and of its proprietors, 
 and that can provide the laboratory and clinical instruction 
 needed to enable the physician to meet the arduous and 
 exacting demands of modern science and modern society. 
 
 But the great problems of medicine are now summed up 
 in the word prevention, and the greatest benefactor of the 
 world is he who directly or indirectly neutralizes or kills 
 the germs or origins of disease. There is nothing more 
 hopeful for the future of medicine than the fact that phy- 
 sicians are eagerly turning their interest and labor to the 
 work of hygiene and prophylaxis. There was much danger, 
 and there is still some danger, that the nonmedical scientist 
 I mean the bacteriologist, the hygienist, and the scientific 
 man abstractly considered should seize upon preventive 
 medicine and leave the physician the more restricted and 
 subordinate domain of therapeutics. If this danger is not 
 obviated through the retention of the grander domain by 
 medical men proper, if they do not hold and lead in the 
 work of prevention, then medicine would in a few years 
 not occupy the proud and honorable position into which 
 she is now gloriously entering. It is professionally a great
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 153 
 
 good fortune that Jenner and Koch were practising physi- 
 cians. May it be that the coming discoveries in prevention 
 shall also be made by physicians, and that we shall all do 
 our work in the sanitary and prophylactic sciences upon 
 which the welfare of society depends. Ours is the only 
 profession that is literally and enthusiastically devoted to 
 professional suicide. 
 
 And we must teach and beg society to help us to commit 
 this divine sort of suicide. We must plead with our 
 masters against their own blindness and indifference to us 
 and to their own welfare. We must beg them to found 
 and endow institutions where, while it is needed, men may 
 best learn the therapeutic wisdom of the past, and also 
 where they may discover the means to make therapeutics 
 itself unnecessary. Pathogeny will soon kill pathology if 
 we give it a chance, because pathogenic knowledge will 
 stop pathologic function. 
 
 We should therefore seek to switch some of the money 
 now fashionably and mechanically going to hospital endow- 
 ments towards institutions devoted more directly to the 
 better education of physicians in the therapeutics and the 
 prevention of disease. Here is an almost unpreempted 
 field and one that infallibly offers speedy and certain re- 
 turns. 
 
 Like morning light surging upward from below the 
 horizon's edge, we all see and know that the sun of scien- 
 tific medical discovery is soon to rise upon our long dark- 
 ened world. We all recognize that we are soon to discover 
 the causes and the prevention of much of the pathologic 
 evil that has filled the world with suffering and gloom up 
 till now. If we could but have the means, if concentrated 
 effort could be brought about, if the awful opportunity 
 could be grasped ! 
 
 There are two sources whence may come the endow- 
 ments of institutions of didactic and preventive medicine : 
 14
 
 154 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 From communal, i. e., governmental gift, or |from private 
 bequest. 
 
 Shall we also feed at the public crib, or seek to do it ? 
 There is not the least discussion as to the abstract duty and 
 self-interest of the state to do this work. It is preemi- 
 nently a state duty and necessity. The resultant good is 
 the good of all, and more particularly is it the good of the 
 coming race. The appeal is to the whole and to the future 
 rather than to the individual and the present. Why then 
 should not the state be educated and compelled to execute 
 its most manifest duty? Simply because the object we 
 seek to realize is an ideal beyond the mental grasp and the 
 moral strength of Lord Demos. In his heart of hearts 
 Demos loves magic and quackery, and in a representative 
 form of government the representor cannot rise far above 
 the moral and intellectual level of the represented. We 
 must do good to men, we must give them good gifts, even 
 though they at first scorn both the gifts and the givers. 
 This is the attitude of mind of all great men. True grati- 
 tude may be ours only after our ears are deaf and dead to 
 the word of belated thanks. 
 
 But there are other reasons why we should not rely upon 
 the government. If the unselfish and worthy may be thus 
 aided, the selfish and the unworthy will bedevil the legisla- 
 tor out of his wits until he consents to their clamor. With 
 state legislatures voting the people's money for hypnotism, 
 homeopathy and humbug and the like, and protecting the 
 infamies of the patent nostrum vendor, what may be ex- 
 pected of Demos and his representatives? In Pennsyl- 
 vania and elsewhere things have already reached the pass 
 of taking every petition from every institution that by the 
 most ludicrous twists of logic do dub themselves charitable, 
 and after footing up all the figures, vote a small lump sum 
 to be divided pro rata among all. Each thus gets at least 
 an ear or a nubbin, and the representative can smile at his
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 155 
 
 constituents until the next election! It thus becomes 
 doubtful if the success of the best institution in securing a 
 governmental grant, even for the best medical purposes, 
 will not in the long run prove a cause for regret rather 
 than for congratulation. It forms a precedent that will 
 enable proprietary and private greed to secure the same 
 benefits, and thus the evil will grow as fast, perhaps even 
 faster, than the good. The watering tongue and the long 
 carnivorous teeth of " me too " will be well hidden beneath 
 the cloak of charity. And if all that the community 
 thinks medical were really so ! If we were a united pro- 
 fession ! But the sectarians make it impossible to speak 
 to the community with one voice. 
 
 I think our reliance must be upon private bequests, and 
 these can be secured only as we educate and interest the 
 rich. We must never weary in showing the neglect of the 
 greatest, most palpable, most certain means of doing good. 
 There is a strange fatality in men, an unaccountable in- 
 ability of seeing the need that lies nearest, the good that is 
 dearest. There is more money to-day devoted to astron- 
 omy than to the prevention of disease. It is positively 
 wonderful to think that men should be more interested in 
 stars and constellations than in their bodies and their 
 physiologic life. 
 
 As educated men there can be no question of our pref- 
 erence for the institutions of didactic medicine that encour- 
 age the better preliminary education. We have shivered 
 to learn that the proportion of college-bred men entering 
 upon medical careers is so ignominiously small, and that it 
 is decreasing. To medical schools connected with univer- 
 sities we should therefore seek to divert the streams of en- 
 dowment. Assuredly the most ludicrous of beggars is the 
 proprietary school seeking endowment without limitation 
 of the professorial salary of the professorial proprietor. If 
 private persons wish to make presents to their private pro-
 
 156 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 fessorial friends, it is a good thing for the friends but 
 the donors may hardly lay claim to much intelligent per- 
 spicuity or to a large humanitarian love. 
 
 And so far as relates to the education of practical physi- 
 cians a most pathetic negligence is that of medical scholar- 
 ships. There may be such, but I do not know of one in the 
 United States. The first noble attempt or example in this 
 direction is that of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 
 Chicago, which has offered free tuition to ten students each 
 year for the purpose of encouraging a higher standard of 
 preliminary and medical education. All honor to the men 
 and institution that set the example. Thousands of scholar- 
 ships exist to help struggling ambition in the fields of gen- 
 eral collegiate training, in theologic, technologic, and in 
 general scientific education ; but with some experience and 
 observation I have never elsewhere witnessed purer ideals 
 more heroically pursued through years of penury and suf- 
 fering than by many medical students. Everybody seems 
 to think it of no question, even a matter for mirth, that a 
 medical student shall endure unspeakable bitterness and 
 loneliness in seeking to prepare himself for a work of the 
 most primal importance and value to the community. If 
 good citizens wish to help noble young men, if they wish 
 to forefend and brighten many tragedies silently and man- 
 fully borne, let them look among medical students. Thous- 
 ands would gladly give more years than the schools demand 
 to their studies and preparation if by rigorous and unan- 
 swerable necessity they were not driven out to speedy 
 bread-winning with its resultant experimentation on the 
 lives of their fellow-men. 
 
 Let us, then, go back to our lay friends with a message, 
 a new gospel we must be absolutely unwearied in preach- 
 ing the message of a new, hitherto-neglected duty to a 
 new, hitherto -neglected science of medicine. Let us prove 
 to them a hundred times over that the best good abstractly
 
 DUTY TO MEDICAL SCIENCE. 157 
 
 is freedom from disease, a healthy life, a reduction of a 
 needlessly high death-rate. Viewed from a low stand- 
 point alone, there is no investment in money so certain of 
 interest, and of so high a rate of interest, as the investment 
 in saved human lives. Let us urge again and again the 
 services of medical men to the community. Where would 
 have been our navies and their victories with scurvy still a 
 scourge ? What a saving in money to the English gov- 
 ernment is that shown by the reduction in the Indian army 
 death-rate from ninety in the thousand to thirteen in the 
 thousand. Pasteur's bacteriologic studies are estimated 
 to have saved France as much money as the entire German 
 indemnity payment. Can the financial value of the work 
 of Lister be estimated, so enormous is it ? In the German 
 army by compulsory vaccination, smallpox is nonexistent, 
 and all over the world, despite the antivaccination cranks, 
 vaccination has saved the nations more money than their 
 present national wealth. We are almost certain that by a 
 similar procedure the dread scourge of cholera may be 
 likewise stopped. Lastly, there are your insurance statis- 
 tics and premiums showing beyond all negation or quibble 
 the lessened death-rate. Compute by average wage and 
 average length of life the money value of a human life ; 
 then multiply and again multiply the three or four years 
 of lengthened life due to medicine of every one in the 
 nation, and in all civilized nations, and compare this amount 
 with the total values of all wealth ! Then it may become 
 manifest what medicine has already done, but before and 
 beyond all what she still promises to do if she have but a 
 tithe of the sympathy and help she deserves.
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE.* 
 
 No subject is more rich in suggestion and in acute de- 
 mand than that of the relations of medicine to those depen- 
 dent upon the community by reason of crime, of disease 
 of body or mind, or of defect, congenital or acquired. 
 Of these classes not one is devoid of medical relations, for 
 as counsellor, as curer, or as preventer, the physician's 
 voice should be heard. If we do not strike hands with 
 Lombroso and say that all crime is due to abnormality of 
 organism, certainly crime and disease have some most inti- 
 mate relations. What are they ? What likewise are the 
 subtle bonds that link together disease, physiologic or 
 neurologic, with mental abnormalism ? We do not seek to 
 escape from our responsibility for much of the world's 
 blindness ; the idiot is physiologically defective ; otology 
 and laryngology have not said their last words as to deaf- 
 mutism ; every United States pensioner holds a physician's 
 certificate (more's the pity !) ; have the surgeons done all 
 that is possible for the cripples ? Have we no accounta- 
 bility for pauperism, no responsibility for the criminally 
 high death-rates, and no guilt for the criminally low aver- 
 age length of life ? In the mysterious tapestry of civiliza- 
 tion disease is weaving a thousand miscolored and rotten 
 fibers that mar its beauty, spoil its design, and weaken its 
 strength. Shall we longer permit with careless consent 
 
 * Abridged Presidential Address delivered before the American Academy 
 of Medicine, at its meeting in Jefferson, N. H., August 29, 30, 1894. From 
 the Bulletin of the Academy 0/1894 and from The Medical News, October 13, 
 1894. 
 
 158
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 159 
 
 such negligent and fateful weaving ? Nay, shall we longer 
 consent to be ourselves such weavers ? 
 
 And when one faces these problems, how they grow ! 
 At first it seems as if the interrelations of the profession, 
 the dependent classes, and the lay community are few and 
 comparatively unimportant, but with sharp observation we 
 see long and strong bands of cause and effect subtly run- 
 ning out and in, like warp and woof, linking and locking 
 one with another and each with all. 
 
 One of the strangest and most dazing truths that soon 
 becomes manifest is that charity as commonly practised is 
 sin. The word, like many another, bears witness to the 
 sad history of mankind. The beautiful Greek word is 
 almost untranslatable into English. Its gracious compas- 
 sion or tender pity has become simply almsgiving a thing 
 usually a double curse, degrading both to the giver and to 
 the receiver. To relieve suffering is the delight and the 
 duty of all good hearts ; but we must see to it, I. That the 
 suffering is real and not fictitious ; 2. That, if real, it is not 
 deserved; 3. And most important, that by our methods we 
 do really relieve and do not increase the suffering. It is 
 just here that we run across the first principle of the 
 charity-organization societies, which is to make benevo- 
 lence scientific. It only needs a few bitter experiences (and 
 we have all had many such, I suppose) in relieving sup- 
 posed suffering without investigation, in giving doles to 
 street beggars, or in cashing checks for unfortunate ac- 
 quaintances, to give us most convincing proofs that under 
 existing circumstances and as human beings are at present 
 constructed, noninvestigating relief increases the evil it 
 thinks to lessen. 
 
 Last year at the Philadelphia Hospital I was puzzled at 
 my vain attempts to cure what seemed a case of simple 
 conjunctivitis. After weeks of varied therapeutic measures 
 I suspected and demonstrated that the " tramp " anointed
 
 160 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 his eyes just prior to each of my visits with a strong solu- 
 tion of soap. In this way he avoided being turned out 
 upon a cold world until springtime came. Another fellow, 
 so long as he remained under treatment, was in receipt of 
 $5.00 a week from the Cigarmakers' Union, and he could 
 at pleasure induce a subacute attack of iritis, filling the 
 anterior chamber of the eye with blood by a very energetic 
 bit of ocular massage. The older surgeons at the Phila- 
 delphia Hospital were often puzzled by the unusual diffi- 
 culty of healing chronic leg-ulcers, until it was found that 
 the owners did not desire to have them healed, and pre- 
 vented healing by tightly binding in the ulcers old-fashioned 
 cents. 
 
 It has for years been my practice to give every street 
 beggar a charity-organization card, with promise of relief 
 if he should be found worthy by the agent of the society. 
 Only one has ever returned, and he was set right without 
 any almsgiving. In China the making of monstrosities 
 was a regular business by putting children in pickling vats 
 for years, by breaking and mending their bones, or by 
 transplanting upon their bodies bits of the skin of animals. 
 We are horrified at this, but are we not equally infamous 
 with our dime-museum glass-eaters, our foundling-asylums, 
 and our patent-medicine beastliness ? 
 
 Mendicity is mendacity. The crimes of tramps and 
 street-beggars are only surpassed by the crimes of those 
 who give to them. Mendicancy in all its forms and masks is 
 not the result of poverty, but is the cause of poverty. All 
 indiscriminate almsgiving, all wholesale crowd-relief, or 
 collective-relief of want or suffering, is either a forged, to- 
 be-protested promise-to-pay note of sympathy, or it is the 
 payment of wages for something done. Nine times out of 
 ten it is selfish charity, or self-flattery. Foolish people 
 love to flatter themselves that they are kind-hearted. 
 Benevolence is fashionable, and fashionable people are 
 fashionable !
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 161 
 
 One of the most debauching and disgusting forms of 
 selfishness is that of indiscriminate philanthropy. For 
 downright diabolism witness the mutual hatreds of two 
 rival professional philanthropists ! Almsgiving, on the 
 other hand, is wages : by giving to beggars and tramps we 
 pay for the continuance and increase of beggary and 
 trampism ; by Sunday breakfasts we increase hunger on 
 Sunday mornings, and we also secure listeners for our 
 pseudoreligious after-performances ; by indiscriminate out- 
 patient relief we stimulate the production of disease, hire 
 patients to experiment on, increase our own reputation or 
 that of our hospital, and at one fine stroke pauperize both 
 the profession and the populace ; by municipal workshops, 
 State aid to the unemployed and socialistic demagogism 
 we hire people to be unemployed, to strike, and to lessen 
 the sum-total of production ; by institutionalism gone mad, 
 we hire the people to get rid of their personal duties to 
 their dependents, and hire those on the borderland of 
 breakdown, physical or mental, to give up the last instinct 
 of self-help. We pay for these things and many like them 
 when we give alms and taxes and hire other people to be 
 sympathetic for us. Of course, what we shirk doing our- 
 selves, our hired agents will hardly do better. " Like 
 master, like man." 
 
 Appalled by this condition we, perhaps, stumble upon 
 the work of the charity-organization societies, and at once 
 we have a clear statement, both of the etiology and the 
 treatment of the disease. Of all things these societies beg 
 that no living spark of compassion or good-will shall be 
 quenched, and no hand reached out to help shall be per- 
 manently withdrawn. There is a profound danger that, 
 chilled by ingratitude and fraud, the foolishly kind shall 
 become the foolishly cruel. If so, it only proves that their 
 former charity was as selfish as their present uncharity. 
 They gave before to please themselves, and refuse help
 
 162 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 now for the same reason. Charity-organization, as I have 
 said, aims at making kindness effective, benevolence scien- 
 tific. The heart must inspire, the intellect carry out. The 
 brain is an inhibitory organ, whether we view it physiologi- 
 cally, scientifically, or sociologically. But inhibition is 
 regulative, not destructive. In the amelioration of the 
 afflictions of mankind, it is only the intellect that can guide 
 to lasting results, but, like the governor of the engine, it 
 cannot supply the living steam, and it would certainly not 
 advise " no steam." 
 
 As stated on the title-page of the excellent little Hand- 
 book for Friendly Visitors Among the Poor, compiled and 
 arranged by the Charity-Organization Society of the City 
 of New York (published by G. P. Putnam's Sons), charity 
 must do five things : 
 
 1. Act only upon knowledge got by thorough investi- 
 gation. 
 
 2. Relieve worthy need promptly, fittingly, and tenderly. 
 
 3. Prevent giving unwise alms to the unworthy. 
 
 4. Raise into independence every needy person when 
 this is possible. 
 
 5. Make sure that no children grow up paupers. 
 Or, we might say: 
 
 1. Don't help frauds. 
 
 2. Help so as to make future help unnecessary. 
 
 3. Don't hire people to be miserable. 
 
 4. Prevent dependency. 
 
 All of this, once more, seems to have little medical bear- 
 ing ; but it is only seemingly so. The booklet contains an 
 important and excellent chapter on sanitary suggestions by 
 Dr. Charles D. Scudder. It should be remembered that it 
 is only an A B C book, so to speak, designed only to guide 
 beginners, to interest, and to lead on to the deeper purposes 
 of the organization. I hope every member of the Academy 
 will get and read the book issued by the Johns Hopkins
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 163 
 
 Press, and edited by President Oilman, entitled The Organi- 
 zation of Charities, being a report of the Sixth Section of 
 the International Congress of Charities, Correction, and 
 Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893. In the last twenty 
 years at least ninety-two charity-organization associations 
 have been formed and are now actively at work in our 
 country, whilst many hundreds exist in Europe. The 
 English Charity-Organization Society is also publishing a 
 series of manuals, of which I mention as of special interest 
 to physicians, one on the feeble-minded child and adult, 
 and one on the epileptic and crippled. Another volume 
 is devoted to insurance and saving (intimately bound up 
 with disease and the medical profession), and there are 
 others on food, on medical charities, on the training of the 
 blind, on the dwellings of the poor, on idiots, imbeciles, 
 etc. The most cursory glance at these works will show 
 how deeply into the whole organization of society the 
 seeds of this ideal are striking root, and how intimately 
 blended are they or may they become with those of 
 medicine. 
 
 But before we can be very consistent or whole-souled 
 charity organizerers we must first clean house ourselves. 
 We must practise what we preach. There are few more 
 outrageous sinners against the principles of the organiza- 
 tion than our profession itself. The London Lancet has 
 recently been weeping very profusely over the failure of 
 the public to respond with sufficient liberality in financial 
 support of the hospitals of London. Curiously enough, 
 the epiphora seems to be caused by a respectably-sized 
 beam in its own professional eye. To justify the tears it 
 cites the number of cases treated in the one hundred and 
 eighty-one London hospitals during 1803. The figures 
 are so huge that it is necessary to quote them in full.
 
 164 
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 SUMMARY OF TABLES. 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 J B 
 
 B 
 
 o 
 
 
 , 
 
 z z 
 
 
 H 
 
 * * 
 
 
 ESP 
 
 B 
 
 H 
 
 Q 
 
 3 E { 
 
 Z H K 
 
 
 - 2 
 
 Sid 
 
 
 M Z"! 
 
 H 
 
 5 
 
 
 w S 
 
 z (j Q 
 
 1* 
 
 
 < i2 
 
 Q W U 
 - 2 
 
 
 
 
 B. 
 1-4 
 
 & 
 
 u 
 
 dJ " 
 
 K H 
 
 Q 
 
 " 
 
 O 
 
 U g 
 
 General Hospitals 
 Special Hospitals 
 Convalescent Hos- 
 
 ^'7,378 
 
 ",747 
 
 49.835 
 28,426 
 
 14,027 
 8,615 
 
 27,607 
 
 14,466 
 
 4,614 
 
 2,611 
 
 3,476 
 2,74 
 
 4.9'0 
 1,974 
 
 ',442,447 
 1,203,830 
 
 222,733 
 20,876 
 
 pitals 
 Dispensaries 
 
 4.069 
 
 25,324 
 
 7,419 
 
 '5,42 l 
 
 68 
 
 1,288 
 
 209 
 
 ",974 
 1,213,039 
 
 192 
 
 Total 
 
 ^35,o67 
 
 103,585 
 
 30,061 
 
 57,494 
 
 7,293 
 
 7.505 
 
 7,093 
 
 3,871,290 
 
 243,801 
 
 Let us leave out of consideration the in-patients (over 
 100,000) and the accident cases (243,801), and fix our 
 attention for a moment upon the (nearly) four-million 
 visits of out-patients. It strikes me that if any hysterics 
 are justified in reference to this appalling figure it would 
 be hysterics of indignation. Can any conscientious physi- 
 cian, can any sane man, believe that this number of people 
 have been adequately considered, and had careful diag- 
 noses made, and discriminating scientific treatment insti- 
 tuted? Can he believe that a vast proportion of these 
 patients were unable to pay some fee for the service ren- 
 dered ? The whole affair begins to become ludicrous. The 
 sentimental grimace of the charity-tragedy is plainly broad- 
 ening into the guffaw of opera bouffe. The cloven foot of 
 selfishness on the part of those lucky or powerful enough 
 to get in charge of these hospitals is all too plainly evident 
 to allow us to be much grieved at the moans and wailings 
 of the melodramatic artist. The competition for these 
 hospital positions among the physicians of London, and 
 everywhere else, for that matter,, is vicious and intolerable. 
 It is a question of sauve qui peut, and After us the deluge. 
 
 But there are some 3000 medical men in London not 
 connected with hospitals ; what of them and of their pro- 
 fessional interests ? Go where one will the same astonish-
 
 CHARITY ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 165 
 
 ing hospital-abuse glares at us. We are debauching and 
 pauperizing both the profession and the public by this 
 gigantic nuisance. Money given for the endowment or 
 support of hospitals is likely to become a curse instead of 
 a blessing to humanity, unless certain provision is made 
 against indiscriminate free treatment. Indiscriminate medi- 
 cal charity is just as pernicious as indiscriminate alms- 
 giving. One is disposed to ask if it might not be well to 
 save much labor by adopting the plan of Louis XIV and 
 Louis XVI, and gratuitously send out millions of bottles 
 of medicine all over the country, with accurate directions 
 " for the relative indication " for taking, etc. Perhaps, even 
 better, we might farm the entire business out to the Ameri- 
 can patent-medicine syndicate ! 
 
 We should also not forget that the absorption of medi- 
 cal energy in the free treatment of disease by those who 
 could pay keeps the profession bound in the treadmill of 
 drudgery and of piddling cures, whilst the nobler and 
 infinitely more important sciences of public hygiene and 
 preventive medicine are left unfurthered or are turned over 
 to the nonmedical world. Thus in this blind man's race 
 we rush impetuously to a silly suicide.* 
 
 How difficult it is to get either the profession or the 
 
 * Specifically, the chief defects of the hospital craze are thus set forth by 
 the Charity-Organization Society in a petition to the House of Lords : 
 
 1. The promiscuous congregation in out-patient departments of large crowds 
 of persons, who in most instances are suffering from slight ailments for which 
 skilled hospital-treatment is quite unnecessary, is a constant hindrance to medi- 
 cal instruction, increases the discomfort and pain of those who are suffering 
 from severe maladies, and occasions much vexatious and needless waiting. 
 
 2. The indiscriminate admission to the benefits of hospitals and dispensaries 
 tempts many who could pay for medical relief to become occasional recipients 
 of charity, and by degrees habitual paupers. 
 
 3. The provision of gratuitous medical relief to large numbers of persons, 
 both as in-patients and out-patients, without inquiry or any sufficient regulation, 
 is, as investigation shows, a serious obstacle to the promotion of provident in-
 
 166 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 public to take any interest in prevention ! Rather than 
 stop the causes once for all, all prefer to peck away at the 
 ever-recurrent effects. Dr. Benjamin Lee tells me that 
 every year the State of Pennsylvania gives $200,000 or 
 $300,000 to hospitals, while all that could be secured for 
 the State Board of Health last year was $6000. 
 
 Up to the present generation charity has been a blind, 
 benevolent tyrant ; now charity-organization proposes to 
 introduce the justice of freedom, the independence of a 
 true democracy. Instead of charity of the modern sort 
 
 stitutions at which medical treatment can be secured by small periodical pay- 
 merits. 
 
 4. Hospitals and free dispensaries, as at present administered, usually offer 
 no special advantages to those artisans and laborers who have combined to 
 make provision against times of sickness, and there is no recognized relations 
 between these hospitals and dispensaries and provident institutions. 
 
 5. There is no clear and definite division of the work between voluntary 
 hospitals and dispensaries, and poor-law infirmaries and dispensaries, but the 
 former deal with cases which might more properly be left to the poor-law, and 
 the latter with cases which, from their medical interest, or special requirements, 
 or from the character and circumstances of the patient, might more properly 
 be treated in charitable institutions. 
 
 6. By the multiplication of gratuitous and part-pay institutions, and the ab- 
 sence of regulation or organization, those medical men whose practice lies 
 among the poorer classes are, year by year, more severely hampered in making 
 a livelihood. 
 
 7. There is keen and continuous competition between hospitals which spend, 
 year after year, sums considerably larger than their average income would 
 justify, and are thus driven to resort to all manner of contrivances to meet 
 their liabilities. 
 
 8. Year by year, also, new hospitals are (sometimes under very doubtful 
 auspices) established for the treatment of special diseases, without any reference 
 to the provision already available. 
 
 9. The hospitals and dispensaries are often ill-grouped for local purposes, 
 and though sometimes a hospital and one or more dispensaries are, from their 
 position, conveniently placed for cooperation, there is no settled relation or 
 agreement between them by which cases may be transferred from dispensary 
 to hospital, and vice versa. 
 
 Id. There is no uniform system of keeping and publishing accounts.
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 167 
 
 we are to have the gracious dignity of personal kindness. 
 Instead of a weak sentimentalism that increases the evil, 
 let there be the wise benevolence that prevents it. Instead 
 of vicarious almsgiving there must be a direct and per- 
 sonal helpfulness that usually leaves out of the count all 
 financial dealings. The ideal seeks to cure where it can, 
 but always to prevent the deplored evil. 
 
 What is the evil ? Dependency. It is, as I have said, a 
 duality of shame and evil, unwelcome alike to giver and 
 receiver, and if not unwelcome, more's the pity ! Every 
 dependent is an unnecessary and an expensive burden to 
 the community. It needs only one observation to show 
 how intimately united, logically and by the most absolute 
 necessity, is the work of charity-organization with that of 
 medicine. There is hardly a dependent whose dependency 
 does not spring from or is not related to physical or men- 
 tal abnormalism. What is the physician's designation of 
 such abnormalism ? Plainly the simple word, disease. 
 The dependent is the patient, curable or not, of society, 
 and he is also the patient of the physician. 
 
 There are two classes of such patients : those directly 
 the result of disease or defect, and those indirectly or par- 
 tially so. In the first class we have the insane, the idiotic, 
 the crippled, the blind, the deaf-mute, the senile, the sick 
 poor, the epileptic. In the second class we have the 
 orphan, the criminal, the pauper, the alcoholic, the beggar, 
 and the tramp. 
 
 The fundamental principles of the treatment of depen- 
 dency by the charity-organization societies, are: I. The 
 personal relation ; no patent-medicine cure, or therapeutics 
 by the wholesale. 2. The permanent cure, when it is pos- 
 sible, by proper and thorough means, not the perpetuation 
 and increase of the disease by doles and homeopathic 
 similia. 3. The prevention of the disease in future by in- 
 dividual health and vitality. Surely no principles could be
 
 168 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 more strictly medical. Every physician must heartily 
 assent to them and seek to apply them. It is my chief 
 object now to suggest that the methods advocated by 
 these societies are genuinely medical, and that in dealing 
 with these patients from the strictly professional standpoint, 
 we as physicians have at hand a powerful therapeutic 
 means spontaneously offered to us. Ours also are the 
 duties of cure and of prevention. As ordinary citizens 
 and members of society we must each become members of 
 the charity-organization societies, and as physicians we 
 should use this method of therapeutics just as we do hos- 
 pitals, climate, nurses, food and sanitation. 
 
 In some respects it seems a great pity that as a pro- 
 fession we have allowed the beneficent exotic of charity- 
 organization to grow almost wholly out of lay ground and 
 not in the sacred soil of medicine. Having done so, how- 
 ever, it is the more our duty to nourish it all in our power 
 and to help to disseminate its blessed fruitage. It is 
 gratifying to learn that physicians are coming to recognize 
 what possibilities of good lie in the movement, and how 
 they are utilizing and guiding it toward splendid results. 
 We may with absolute truth urge that with our profes- 
 sional help the ideal will find a speedier, a more solid, and 
 a more lasting realization than without. It is for the wel- 
 fare of the movement that its leaders seek to interest us 
 and elicit our sincere and powerful cooperation. We in- 
 deed rest all our treatment upon the personal and single 
 consideration ; we must as therapeutists individualize our 
 cases ; we also aim to cure, not relieve and in relieving 
 perpetuate the disease ; above all things we too believe in 
 prevention. 
 
 Applying these principles to the second class of our de- 
 pendents we find a multifold variety of duties and methods 
 at once springing into view. Even as to mendicancy we 
 have an especial professional function. Begging is a crime
 
 CHARITY- ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 169 
 
 against the law. Let us help to put the law in action. The 
 self-exposure of the crippled and blind, the shams of the 
 pencil-peddler, the parading of suffering to elicit alms 
 such things should be stopped. They are usually masked 
 under the excusing guise of physical infirmity. If real 
 suffering exists, ten to one it is deserved, and even if so, 
 there is a proper mechanism of relief and cure, which we 
 as physicians can make operative. It is better to hire such 
 people to be warm than to be cold, to do something useful 
 than to do something hideously useless. There is a place 
 and a possible useful occupation for every tramp and every 
 beggar. Most of them do not want to have their infirmity 
 healed. Ours is the duty of unmasking at least the physi- 
 cal fraud. 
 
 And we also know as few others the influence of idleness 
 in the production of pauperism and disease. The physi- 
 ologic inaction of the occupants of our poorhouses and 
 asylums is a prolific breeder of disease and preventive of 
 cure. Let us help to do away with this foul shame. Our 
 descendants will wonder at our heathenish cruelty and 
 shortsightedness when they read that we house our insane, 
 epileptics, paupers, and even our criminals in forced idle- 
 ness at an enormous expense to the thrifty producer, and 
 with multiplication of physical and mental evils. 
 
 Much of our institutional life is a practical reward for 
 and promoter of laziness, a destroyer of the safeguards of 
 health. The charity-driblets and free-soup philosophy of 
 life is despicable. Rather than cheap and free food we 
 should teach the poor the proper choice, the proper cookery, 
 and the proper use of food. Any American family wastes 
 more food than would keep a French family of the same 
 social status, but it will be a long time before our people 
 listen to Mr. Edward Atkinson's advice in these respects. 
 A few years ago my friend, Mr. Bond, of Cambridge, Eng- 
 land, took charge of the poor-law administration of the
 
 1 70 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MfcDIClNE. 
 
 city. By the methods of charity-organization he has already 
 reduced the municipal annual expense of this item from 
 about $40,000 to $15,000 with great coincident improve- 
 ment in the condition of the deserving poor. There are 
 some 218,000 out-door senile paupers in England, and yet 
 in twenty years the mere fall in the prices of food, etc., 
 would have enabled every one of them to have insured 
 himself against pauperism had he but saved his excess and 
 from 1874 applied it in the way of insurance-premiums. 
 In Buffalo, N. Y., a comparison of twelve years with out- 
 door relief with twelve years without out-door relief showed 
 a saving of $700,000 and also a saving of in-door relief 
 of over $400,000 in all over a million dollars, and a less 
 number of paupers to-day than fifteen years ago. 
 
 As to the criminal, it is yet an open question how far his 
 condition is a result, direct or indirect, of congenital or ac- 
 quired disease. The relation at least needs to be carefully 
 studied by medical men. But that the criminal should be 
 an expense to the law-abiding thrifty is outrageous. 
 
 But it is to the prevention of pauperism that we should 
 look most sharply. Let us see, for example, if we cannot 
 avoid the evils of the English system in its treatment of 
 destitute children, who are crushed together in orphan- 
 asylums and " barrack schools," from 200 to 1400 in each. 
 This costs the producer $150 a head, almost one-half going 
 for officers' salaries. 
 
 If we turn to classes of dependents whose conditions 
 result almost directly and wholly from disease we are 
 struck by the magnitude of the task and the multiplicity of 
 methods of cure. It is not my purpose, because of lack 
 both of ability and of time, to review the etiology and sug- 
 gest the treatment of the evils of insanity, of epilepsy, of 
 idiocy, and the like. It is only by the cooperation of a 
 thousand minds working through many years that we shall 
 reach any satisfactory solution. I desire only to ask the
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 171 
 
 question, Shall we as physicians, and especially shall the 
 American Academy of Medicine, undertake to help in the 
 great work ? 
 
 As to the hopeless idiot, the impossibility of cure, and 
 the impossibility of reaching the ultimate causes of the pro- 
 duction of this class of cases, have led some to the question 
 we all shrink from asking. And yet, despite the dangers, 
 there are those who see no really valid argument against 
 the many valid ones for a legalized, public, beneficent sen- 
 tence of painless death upon him. We each silently vote 
 the sentence in our silent prayer that if we should become 
 hopelessly idiotic we would not wish to be allowed to live. 
 
 The blind, the needlessly blind, are the ghosts in the 
 empty chairs at every ophthalmologic banquet. We are 
 glad that best efforts are being made toward the chief re- 
 form. Alas ! that we cannot pay the lobbies to get a little 
 law passed to prevent much of the world's blindness. 
 Politics has reached such a state of degradation that a 
 definite sum of " blood-money " seems often required to 
 secure the most cryingly-needed legislation. 
 
 The crippled, the chronically diseased, the deaf-mute, the 
 prematurely senile, etc., all have the most vital relations 
 with medicine. We can do much to cure and to alleviate, 
 and all may be made self-supporting, and certainly made 
 more happy, by self-help and self-dependence. 
 
 Perhaps of all diseased people the epileptic demands our 
 greatest compassion, and it is precisely he that reacts most 
 wonderfully to our treatment. It is again sadly strange 
 that the best treatment has been devised by the nonmedi- 
 cal. Our failure to cure by drugs or by the trephine 
 should have stimulated us to increased effort instead of 
 shaming us into inaction. Intellectual and sensitive, other- 
 wise able-minded and able-bodied, the epileptic is thrown 
 out of work and out of ordinary social life by his mysterious 
 malady. It is gratifying to know that the colony-plan has
 
 172 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 at last found a footing in England and in America, but it is 
 horrifying to know that there are to-day thousands of these 
 shunned and shunning, suffering souls deprived of the hap- 
 piness that might so easily be theirs.* There is probably 
 nothing in the world that is such an inspiriting example of 
 beneficent blessedness as the Bielefeld Epileptic Colony in 
 Germany or the Magull Home near Liverpool, England. 
 Most if not all of you know well enough about these places, 
 and I need not weary you with details. If not, read the 
 account in the Charity-Organization Manual. At Bielefeld 
 in 1891 there were treated 1277 patients, if patients they 
 may be called in this beautiful home-like place, at once 
 most hospitable, but most unhospital-like. The colony is 
 largely self-supporting. At the Magull Home, a relatively 
 small institution, but perhaps all the better for that, the 
 " home-treatment " with no bromids, or very little, is re- 
 markably successful. " In fourteen of those who passed 
 through the house during the year, the fits had been 
 arrested at the end of the year." " In the case of twenty- 
 two patients the fits in the first half of their stay during the 
 year numbered 1673, but in the second half, 948, a decrease 
 of 725." Dr. Alexander believes that such homes may be 
 made entirely self-supporting. There is no idleness. Idle- 
 ness, as Dr. Ferrier says, " increases the instability of the 
 nervous system." The chief and necessary therapeutic 
 measures are country-life, home-life, employment, con- 
 genial surroundings, good nourishment, and little or no 
 bromid. 
 
 I had a number of notes and gathered data of interest as 
 to crippled children and as to feeble-minded children and 
 
 * In Germany the number of epileptics is about one per thousand of the 
 population. Dr. Peterson puts the number of epileptics in New York State 
 alone at double this number, or about I2OO. This would give us in the 
 United States about 130,000, ah infinitesimal portion of which only has proper 
 care.
 
 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 173 
 
 girls, and what maybe done for them ; but I must pass the 
 subjects by. 
 
 Another reproach of medicine, and especially of psy- 
 chology, is insanity. To this I can also make but passing 
 reference. A prominent neurologist has lately passed 
 severe criticism upon his brother-specialists as regards the 
 treatment of insanity. That many of the criticisms are just 
 few even of those " touched " would deny. But few would 
 also deny that in many respects the charges were often 
 greatly exaggerated, and that many qualifying or contra- 
 dicting facts were left out of the count. Such, for example, 
 were the unmentioned facts that in the city wherein he 
 spoke the criticised " banishment of the white caps from 
 the wards " had been of profound good, and that the desired 
 abrogation of locks and bolts was also exemplified. Yet 
 another is the fact that there are nineteen training-schools 
 in the United States for the special training of nurses for 
 the insane. But whatever has been done, there remain 
 herculean tasks yet to do. What a shame it is that many 
 thousands of overactive, unstrung nervous systems are in 
 idleness, consuming body and mind, hoplessly and expen- 
 sively, when the burden to the taxpayer, to the physician, 
 and to the sufferer might be greatly lightened or entirely 
 taken off by colonization, employment, and individualiza- 
 tion. 
 
 And thus we ever return to the same repeated lesson, 
 whatever the kind of dependency we study. The Charity- 
 Organization Society has found a remedy for much, if not 
 all the evils. It remains for us to aid, to utilize, and to 
 realize the clearly realizable ideal. 
 
 It corresponds, for example, with the American charac- 
 ter to do things in a large and lavish way, and we have the 
 awful and growing evils of institutionalism. A dangerous 
 habit is also exaggerating and deepening the evil : I refer 
 to the voting of the taxpayer's money to private institu-
 
 174 CHARITY-ORGANIZATION AND MEDICINE. 
 
 tions. In New York State nearly $3,000,000 a year are 
 thus given to private institutions for orphan children and 
 the friendless. For charities and correctional purposes the 
 State of Pennsylvania gives to private institutions about 
 one-third of all amounts thus spent. In a series of years 
 this amounted to about $ 1 2,000,000. What a wretched and 
 criminal blunder ! In politics, as well as in sociology, we 
 need to learn the lessons of other countries and of other 
 methods. We have yet to perceive all the reductio ad ab- 
 surdum, all the ironical truth of the pertinent question, 
 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes f Mechanically - working, 
 military-governed, outwardly-splendid, noncurative prison- 
 palaces are not the proper or lasting solutions of the prob- 
 lems of dependency. Charity-organization says we must 
 individualize our cases and get into personal relations with 
 our dependents ; and charity-organization is right. It says 
 we must seek to cure, not simply to endure them ; that we 
 must give them interesting employment ; that we must 
 reward sanity and self-help, not encourage the weak to throw 
 away self-respect; that we must get our dependents into 
 the country and into an approximation to home-life, etc. 
 And in all this charity-organization is right, and the way 
 of the world is wrong. Let us adopt and carry into prac- 
 tice the better therapeutic methods !
 
 HOSPITALISM.* 
 
 Definition. The dispensary-disease, or hospitalism, is 
 a contagious, epidemic, ingravescent neurosis of civilization, 
 limited (it is to be hoped) as regards time to the present 
 fin de siecle and as regards geographic distribution to 
 urban populations ; it attacks three considerable classes, 
 the professional philanthropist, the commercial physician, 
 and the social sponger, and, so far as medicine is concerned, 
 is characterized by a maniacal propensity to professional 
 suicide, and to the spread of the disease by the inoculation 
 of the will with the germs of the affection. 
 
 Etiology. In brief, there are two chief etiologic factors. 
 The first consists in the morbid desire of the lazy charity- 
 monger to perform his duties vicariously ; the second 
 springs from the ambition of certain physicians to " get on, 
 regardless." From the interactions and mutual comple- 
 mentings of these two cachexiae arises the distinct type of 
 disease called hospitalism. These two agencies may need 
 an added word of explanation. The first, the habit of the 
 professional philanthropist, united to the universal desire to 
 satisfy conscience with vicarious charity, is a widespread 
 evidence of religious and ethical anemia, resulting in multi- 
 form sociologic denutrition and malfunction. The unregen- 
 erate layman, the civilized savage of modern times, is sub- 
 ject to a strange hypnotic delusion that the universal law 
 of the biologic world antedating civilization is an egregious 
 
 * A paper read before the American Academy of Medicine, at Baltimore, 
 May 4, 1895. Published first in the Bulletin of the Academy, 1895, and in 
 the Medical News of June 22, 1895. 
 
 '75
 
 1 76 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 error. This law has up to now proceeded on the assump- 
 tion that health and vitality are the conditions of permitted 
 life, and that this health and vitality are based essentially 
 upon pay or equivalence of service, upon personal self-de- 
 pendence, desire, and effort. The modern philanthropist 
 jauntily sets aside the wisdom of the ages, the necessities of 
 evolution, and all that, and says he has a much better idea 
 of how to conduct the universe than has God. Acting 
 upon this antithetic science he says the conditions of social 
 health are the encouragement of personal dependence and 
 the increase of pauperism. His remarkable therapeutic 
 theory is that to cure a disease we must administer a 
 remedy that in health would produce exactly the symptoms 
 of the disease. He therefore seeks to cure pauperism and 
 dependence by increasing the number of paupers and de- 
 pendents. 
 
 There is nothing so delightful to weak souls as the unc- 
 tuous self-flattery of benevolence, and there are few things 
 more satisfying than to rid one's self of a nagging duty. We 
 thus have two classes of citizens : The tremendously large 
 class that pay others to perform their personal duties, and 
 the very small class of those that hire themselves out as 
 agents of the first class. Charity and the personal relation 
 to the poor and sick are thus deftly avoided by this copart- 
 nership, and alms-giving and institutionalism deceptively 
 act as vicegerents of the genuine officers. This is the first 
 factor of the dispensary-disease. 
 
 The second factor is confined to the medical profession 
 itself. Like most other people, certain doctors desire to 
 " get on, regardless." The vicarious and professional phil- 
 anthropist offers him the means in the shape of institutions 
 for the treatment of all other diseases except the hospitalic 
 variety. (Perhaps in the progress of time and with the 
 growth of virtue we shall have a special hospital in every 
 large city where may be treated those in the acute and vio-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 177 
 
 lent stages of the terrible disease, Epidemic Hospitalism.) 
 If the enterprising doctor can get himself appointed " Pro- 
 fessor," or " visiting physician " to one of the numerous in- 
 stitutions supplied by the vicarious philanthropist he will 
 at once become better known ; he will be furnished abun- 
 dant " clinical material; " he will get ahead of his less fortu- 
 nate brothers ; and he will assuredly " get on, regardless." 
 Lachrymose sentimentalism and philanthropic vanity are 
 appealed to, endowments follow, wills and codicils to wills 
 are made, and lo ! there arise the lofty walls, the spacious 
 wards, the waiting-rooms and operating-rooms, the crowded 
 out-patient departments, the boards of wealthy trustees, 
 and the not-to-be-forgotten medical staff itself. 
 
 Sometimes the physician bound to get on, the business 
 doctor, sans phrase, conceals his ambition with the broad 
 mantle of institutionalism itself, and it appears that the pa- 
 tient (the doctor-patient afflicted with the disease) indulges 
 in a mild monomania of enthusiasm for his particular 
 medical college, for medical science, and for the purposes of 
 medical instruction. He solemnly contends that without 
 an abundance of clinical material the best medical instruc- 
 tion would be impossible and medical colleges would lan- 
 guish. His by-standing confreres, not yet afflicted with the 
 disease, smile pityingly, both at the patient's delusions and 
 at the sorry belief of the patient that he is deceiving those 
 about him as to the real motives of his mind. Those 
 healthy-minded attendants know that there will always be 
 an abundance of clinical material supplied by the worthy, 
 the deserving, and the really poor, without the appeal of 
 competitive medical charity to those who could pay for 
 medical service. They also know that nine times out of 
 ten his medical college itself has no ethical or scientific 
 raison d'etre whatever, but is itself simply another bit of 
 objective evidence of personal and selfish ambition on the 
 part of those who are " getting on, regardless " by means 
 16
 
 178 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 of their " Professorships " and the advertisement of official 
 position. If one has been vouchsafed a clear glance into 
 the inferno of political chicanery and undiluted deviltry 
 that often go on to secure a professorship in a modern 
 medical college, he will have a perfect demonstration of the 
 altruism and the purity of the " charity " at work among 
 the candidates. Men do not smash the entire Decalogue 
 and commit all the venial sins in order to get an oppor- 
 tunity to be kind to the sick or to teach boys how to cure 
 disease. 
 
 The etiology of hospitalism may, therefore, be epitomized 
 as consisting, first, in the morbid desire of the well-to-do to 
 rid themselves of real charity and of the duty of personal 
 hand-to-hand and face-to-face kindness, by the self-decep- 
 tive, vicarious makeshift of almsgiving; and, second, to the 
 get-on-regardless physician, reckless of the good of the 
 profession, greedy of office and of patients, even though 
 they are of the nonpaying variety. Professorialism is only 
 a variant of the disease of hospitalism, not a distinct type 
 of disease. 
 
 Symptomatology. The disease afflicts three distinct 
 classes of society, and has a somewhat different symptom- 
 complex in each class. 
 
 I. The first, the endowing class, many of them placed 
 by death beyond the reach of criticism, is composed of 
 those that mistakenly preferred to patch up effects rather 
 than altogether to prevent them, and who left their money 
 without proper stipulation of the conditions under which 
 their trust should be administered. Theirs is a mournful 
 error. There are so many ways, especially in medicine, of 
 preventing disease, of killing the causes of diseases, instead 
 of curing the individualized results, that it is shameful that 
 they did not add wisdom to pity, and to kindness, intellect. 
 If we could but show the benevolent how much greater and 
 more speedily reached would be the effect of their charity
 
 HOSPITALISM. 179 
 
 if applied to the encouragement of preventive medicine in- 
 stead of to curative medicine : One well-equipped and en- 
 dowed laboratory of hygiene, of bacteriology, or of sanitary 
 science would do more for humanity than a dozen hos- 
 pitals. To prevent diphtheria is a million times better than 
 to keep everlastingly treating children ill with diphtheria. 
 
 But the unwise endower of hospitals committed another 
 intellectual sin and in this world intellectual error at last 
 and always results in millionfold moral error. He failed to 
 condition his gift with the necessary limitation that as a 
 result of his charity none but the needy and deserving 
 should profit by it. Without that condition, in the muta- 
 tions of time, his kindness becomes an engine of evil, both 
 to them who receive and to them who administer. 
 
 The endower is sometimes the State or the city. The 
 fact itself proves that giving to hospitals has so long been 
 recognized as right, per se, that no regard need to be paid 
 as to how the money is spent. It is a most remarkable 
 fact, this of giving away millions of the public money with- 
 out a single stipulation, and hardly without a demand for 
 accounting. When given to public officers for State 
 asylums and hospitals the precedent is bad enough, but to 
 church, sectarian, and college hospitals, and even to private 
 institutions this decidedly is to be thought twice about. 
 
 In the scramble of the competitive medical-charity de- 
 bauch, the hungry institutions have hit upon a plan of 
 making the universal public a universal endower. Every- 
 body must be made to feel how good he is and to experi- 
 ence the pleasures of almsgiving. We thus have every 
 imaginable form and invention of beggary spurred to the 
 limit of endurance and of impertinence. Hospitals Sun- 
 days, fairs, " dances for sweet charity," masked gambling, 
 and heaven knows what else are instituted. It might, with 
 self-restrained people it certainly should, suggest a little 
 prudence to see how prominent in getting up and pushing
 
 180 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 on these things are the wives, mothers-in-law, the personal 
 friends, or the relatives of the ambitious visiting physician, 
 or would-be professor, the advertiser, the newspaper 
 doctor, et hoc genus omne. The motive of self-seeking is 
 too often but poorly, very poorly, concealed, and sometimes 
 it is thought good enough to boast about. 
 
 2. The second class, the lay-public, likewise suffers from 
 the disease, although it thinks itself very cunning and 
 lucky in having the disease. There are more diseases than 
 hysteria that people love to suffer with, and the dispensary- 
 affection is an example. There is no evil that is more 
 ruinous than the awful one of communism. When a man 
 gets that poison in his blood he will be a curse to the world 
 until he is well-hanged, thoroughly dead, and everlastingly 
 buried. There is no curse so fatal as the curse of desiring 
 to get something for nothing. It is the half-hidden rock 
 upon which the very ship of state, democracy itself, is run- 
 ning headlong. Nothing is serving so subtly and so 
 powerfully to prevent physical and social health, and to 
 keep the world in the thraldom of disease, as medical beg- 
 gary and medical communism. When a man buys medical 
 service for nothing he pays a high price for it. He culti- 
 vates the habit of lazy reliance on medical aid, and grows 
 careless of hygiene. The people think they are fortunate 
 in being treated for nothing, but instead of curing, the 
 "treatment" really fastens the disease perpetually upon the 
 very heart of the body politic. The medical profession is 
 bound to the treadmill of curing individual cases and the 
 effects of disease, instead of shutting off the causes of dis- 
 ease. The profession is so hardly pressed .and so poorly 
 paid that its members have no time to prevent disease. 
 One of the great curses of medicine is the commercial 
 medical colleges, with the resultant superabundance of 
 doctors. The hospital and dispensary disease is encour- 
 aged by (nay, is one of the direct results of) the commer-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 181 
 
 cial medical college, and the vicious circle is completed by 
 the mere reversal of the process. The rivalries and ambi- 
 tions and " politics " of competitive medical charities, dis- 
 played every day stark naked to the public, at once 
 arouse and disgust the world, and keep low that standard 
 of professional dignity and honor, so that the profession 
 cannot demand and command health. Hygiene and pre- 
 ventive medicine could at once halve the death-rate if we 
 had the respect of the community, if we but spoke clearly 
 and could carry to realization the known laws of life-saving. 
 
 If the cunning Communist only got what he thinks he 
 is sponging ! But every physician knows well enough he 
 does not get it. How can one man diagnosticate the dis- 
 eases of a hundred patients with scientific precision and 
 treat them effectively in an hour ? I may not speak dog- 
 matically of other departments of medicine than my own, 
 but I must confess that out of hundreds of cases of hospital 
 refraction work that I have afterward examined in my 
 private office I have never yet seen one, my own included, 
 that was correct. If only the deserving poor were treated, 
 there would not be the crowds ; if the physician received 
 even the smallest fee, that fact would make the patient the 
 master instead of the obsequious sponger; and then the 
 doctor's work would have to be better, or the natural laws 
 of competition would soon settle the fate of the bungler, 
 and the " hustler," and the " cooker " of hospital statistics. 
 
 I am not at all certain as to the effect upon the social 
 world of the free treatment of patients with syphilis and 
 gonorrhea and alcoholism a fact that constitutes a large 
 part of hospital-disease. There are two sides to that ques- 
 tion. I am not a little doubtful as to the ethics, and even 
 as to the worldly wisdom of turning the hospital into an 
 annex of the bagnio and the bar-room, a convenience 
 whereby the natural punishment of the infractions of the 
 sexual and hygienic laws (upon which life itself rests) may
 
 182 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 be escaped. It is not quite certain that we can get the best 
 of God in such ways. There is entirely too much of the 
 " prophylaxis-of-gonorrhea " business tainting the whole 
 profession, and literally befouling much hospital-practice. 
 One might more dogmatically decide as to the wisdom of 
 the common social commingling of the prostitute and the 
 innocent in the hospital-wards and the dispensary waiting- 
 rooms. 
 
 3. But the physician is interested in his profession, and 
 the influence of hospitalism upon our guild is becoming 
 pernicious in the extreme. Take the simple fact of hos- 
 pital-manners. I well understand that neither the posses- 
 sion of the doctorate degree, nor the possession of the 
 knowledge and skill it should certify, can make a man a 
 gentleman. But there is no doubt that the instant influence 
 of the necessity of treating crowds of mingled deserving 
 poor and of indistinguishable spongers acts disastrously 
 upon the physician's disposition and manners. The very 
 work wherein gentle kindness is as the sunshine's benedic- 
 tion over the gracious harvest-fields of benevolence is trans- 
 formed into bitterness and harshness. What is more dis- 
 gusting than arrogance and dictatorialness in a physician ? 
 What is more common in hospitals and dispensaries ? A 
 dog judges of his master's mood by the manner and the 
 timbre of voice, although he understands hardly a word of 
 language proper. Every hospital-patient, likewise, forms 
 quick conclusions as to the man's character under whose 
 care he comes, and instead of gratitude for the service 
 rendered the ungentlemanly physician is breeding through 
 the community a condition of mind that bodes no good for 
 medicine. The patient thinks himself sharp to secure some 
 benefit from grudging surliness, and the overworked, non- 
 paid, half-excusable doctor is glad to get through his job 
 in one or another wretched way. " He has the European 
 habit and style " such is the patient's verdict. The pa-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 183 
 
 tients know well enough when they are looked upon as 
 "clinical material," and when, on the other hand, they are 
 sympathetically treated as unfortunate human beings, whom 
 we have the privilege of helping. 
 
 And this leads to the thought that nothing so speedily 
 and surely as hospitalism leads to the degeneration of the 
 physician into the therapeutic or pathologic fiend. If, as 
 is well known, an interne or visiting physician hangs about 
 a hospital beyond a certain time, the more certainly will he 
 fail as a practicing physician. Every day in the hospital 
 teaches him to dissociate disease from humanity, and to fix 
 his attention upon morbidity, per se. He learns to treat 
 disease and not the diseased human being. The laboratory, 
 necessary as it is, runs the danger of becoming the execu- 
 tion-chamber of practical therapeutics. Every disease must 
 be seen through the lens of personality before it can be 
 thoroughly understood. There is no disease, there are 
 only diseased tissues and the tissues are alive, and there 
 is a living soul unifying all the tissues into that strange 
 product of life, Homo; and Homo is not one individual, 
 but includes conditions, family, heredity, age. The rage 
 for " clinical material " is becoming a genuine mania, itself 
 a downright disease, a disgrace to curative medicine. 
 Street-car placards and column-long newspaper " ads " so- 
 liciting patients are part of the expenses of some hospitals. 
 From a daily paper I clipped the following racy account ; 
 it has too much of the air of truth to be more than half lie : 
 
 "A local employment agency has instituted a unique depar- 
 ture. A few days* ago an advertisement appeared in the 
 morning paper which read: 'Wanted A young man suffering 
 from pulmonary or heart disease. Examination free." Inquiry 
 at the office of the advertiser elicited the information that the 
 'young man' was wanted for the various hospitals about town, 
 which were anxious to get live subjects for clinical demonstra- 
 tion. ' The applicants are received here,' said the manager of
 
 184 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 the agency, ' and are promptly examined. The eligible ones, 
 that is, those who are found to be victims of the two diseases in 
 question, are given cards for presentation at the hospitals which 
 we serve. They are paid well for their services, and they suffer 
 no inconvenience from their experience at the hands of the sur- 
 geons. Sometimes, in fact, they reap benefits which they had 
 not counted on, some of them regaining complete health under 
 the treatment. So you see pulmonary and heart affections 
 command a sort of premium. Sometimes we find among the 
 applicants some cases even more interesting than we had 
 expected. These men, of course, command more money than 
 the ordinary sufferers." ' 
 
 But all these methods of trapping game are often only 
 diversions of the strong, subdominant motive of practice- 
 hunting and success-advertising. Just as the great pro- 
 fessors give lectures at medical colleges in order to get 
 consulting practice, so will men consent to bang through a 
 lot of " charity-cases " at the hospital and dispensary in 
 order to have the eclat of the position and the fame that in 
 one way or another brings private practice. Sometimes, 
 indeed, it is not by the indirect means of the fame that pa- 
 tients are secured, but upon one excuse or another the 
 modus operandi is well known the hospital is made a very 
 direct feeder of the private office. 
 
 And what brutal injustice is the indiscriminate treatment 
 of hospital-crowds to the younger members of the profes- 
 sion, and to those, the immense majority, who are not of 
 the elect the poor fellows who are neither professors, 
 chiefs, nor visiting physicians; it is among the lay poor 
 that the professional poor must work. After years of 
 heroic preparation the young graduate finds the very 
 teachers who have taken his money for instruction treating 
 questionless and gratis those who should be his own pay- 
 patients. I have a profound sympathy for the young and 
 unsuccessful physician. He has been outrageously de-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 185 
 
 ceived, and is daily being outrageously treated by men of 
 his own guild, to whom he has a natural right to turn for 
 aid in this matter. If he settle in the country, the reckless- 
 ness of the city-hospital and dispensary government pursues 
 him like a fury. The non-discriminating urban physician 
 receives the country patient without question. It is thought 
 that the distance from which the countryman comes can- 
 cels all scruples as to duty to one's colleagues. Medical 
 ethics have at best very narrow geographic limitations.* 
 Only the countryman's local physician knows whether he 
 is able to pay or not but how often is the matter inquired 
 about by the city brother ? Even in private practice the 
 rights of the distant local physician are but little considered ; 
 how much less, then, are they considered at the dispensary ? 
 And thus, to summarize, are we cruelly, consciously, 
 persistently committing professional suicide. Every noodle- 
 head knows that that which costs no thought or labor is 
 not appreciated by men, and yet we tumble over each other 
 in our mad rush to do our grand work for nothing. We 
 make the most valuable thing the most despised by our 
 pusillanimous politics, until the poor public learns, instead 
 
 * A remedy for the abuse of medical charity is offered by " A Young Sub- 
 scriber " in a letter to the Medical Record. He suggests that the victim of 
 this abuse " the next time and whenever he has need of a consultation, or has 
 a patient to send to a specialist, avoid the man who daily robs him by indis- 
 criminate dispensary-work, and pick out instead one who regards the rights of 
 his fellows. There are men at the heads of dispensary classes throughout the 
 city enjoying large special practices, who boast that they have no care for the 
 financial standing of their dispensary-cases so long as they furnish the required 
 material for clinical purposes, and as for the complaining doctors, they say, ' Let 
 them go and be blanked.' So long as they can do this and keep the support 
 of the general practitioner, they will hold the same views. The moment they 
 find it affecting their pockets they may at least cease to pride themselves upon 
 their dirty treatment of their professional brethren. Let the non-dispensary 
 men look to their rights, and they will soon have less wrongs." Boston Med. 
 and Surg. Jour., March 21, 1895.
 
 186 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 of respect, contempt of us. Where is the hospital for free 
 legal advice? And yet which is the most honored, medi- 
 cine or the law ? Oh ! for a breath, nay, a blast, of profes- 
 sional self-respect that would sweep us into unity. Why 
 should we not have some organization, some esprit de corps f 
 Even thieves preserve some sort of honor among them- 
 selves. 
 
 Treatment. Let us briefly consider the treatment of 
 the disease. What can be done to abate this graceless 
 nuisance ? A thousand good hearts and wise minds are 
 racked by this problem. It is almost impossible to find a 
 way out. In fact, we have gotten ourselves so pitiably dis- 
 eased that we can hardly hope for much else than a life of 
 chronic invalidism, at least so far as this generation is con- 
 cerned. The disease, if one may so speak, is intensely 
 chronic. One thing is certain, we cannot make men moral 
 by act of Congress. There is not one great general 
 remedy. Everyone of us must take the matter up. The 
 Kingdom of Heaven is within you. The influence of one, 
 of each individual, steadily and patiently opposing the 
 wrong, will, in time, transform the whole. Every one of us 
 has power ; each one of us has been a sinner ; each one may 
 do little or much toward stemming the evil trend. 
 
 And first as to the endowers, whether individual or com- 
 munal, let us preach incessantly and repetitively the truth 
 that indiscriminate charity is unadulteratedly sinful and 
 cruel. Every penny given without inquiry as to merit is 
 simply hiring people to be sufferers. In a great civilized 
 country, only last year, there was discovered to be a fiend- 
 ish manufactory of cripples and victims to excite pity and 
 secure alms from the " charitable." Children's eyes were 
 gouged out and every bone in their bodies broken, in 
 order, by their exposure, to stir up the sensibilities of the 
 " kind-hearted," who, by their gifts, kept the manufactory 
 " running on full time." Just as certainly does indiscrim-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 187 
 
 inate charity operate now, and here, and everywhere. 
 God's command is infinitely stern, but it is just as infinitely 
 compassionate, that in the sweat of the brow shall we earn 
 our bread. The lives of East Indian ryots are quite as 
 happy, fully as comfortable, and far more moral than those 
 of an American mob of train-wrecking strikers ; and yet the 
 annual income of the ryot is not one-thirtieth of that of the 
 striker. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood that there is to be no chill- 
 ing of sympathy, no killing of kindness, no less giving, 
 because of this law of life. There is to be all the more 
 but the sympathy is to be intellectualized, the kindness is 
 to be made effective, and the giving is really to stop the 
 suffering, and not increase it. 
 
 We must teach the rich that every endowment of hospi- 
 tals and dispensaries must be conditioned, narrowly, rigidly 
 conditioned, upon the law that only emergency-cases and 
 the absolutely deserving poor are to be treated in hospitals. 
 When importuned to contribute on hospital-Sundays, or 
 to attend entertainments, charity-balls, etc., etc., let us re- 
 fuse, and publicly refuse, unless the managers of such hos- 
 pitals publicly state that rigid exclusion of those able to 
 pay something for medical services is carefully and sys- 
 tematically assured. 
 
 The indiscriminateness of the doled-out charity of the 
 hospitals is a natural result of the stupid indiscrimination 
 of endowers. These-pour out the money, year after year, 
 and century after century, in reckless disregard of the laws 
 of economics, of the real needs of the community, and of 
 the experiences of other lands. Hospital-farms for epilep- 
 tics, for the insane, homes for convalescents, homes for the 
 dying, special hospitals of various kinds, especially for the 
 tuberculous these and more are pitifully wanted, and yet 
 the old ways and the old evils are stupidly increased. If 
 we could only have an omniscient or even half-wise Czar
 
 I8S HOSPITAUSM. 
 
 to direct almsgiving ; if it were only someone's business to 
 instruct people how to give their money. At present it 
 depends either upon haphazard or upon the cunning wiles of 
 some interested person. Rich plebeians, right versed as to 
 oil, or beer, or dry goods, are made presidents or trustees, 
 flattered to the top of their bent with the bauble of office and 
 authority in the things of which they haven't even a spark or 
 a glimpse of knowledge, all in order to wheedle endowments 
 out of them. These go on building wings and additions to old 
 evils, until, as with church-building, the historic momentum 
 results in monstrous aggregations of multiform uselessness 
 or abuse. And every day or two the daily newspaper- 
 reporter gets hold of some scandal, a dying patient refused 
 admission to hospitals, a fisticuff of rival visiting physicians, 
 the "politics" of rival hospitals, etc., etc., and regales his 
 readers with it. All the time the evil grows, until one of 
 these fine days the donkey endower will suddenly awaken 
 to a realization of the fact that he has been imposed upon, 
 and that his ears are several inches longer than they should 
 be. Then he will resign, shut up his pocket-book very 
 tight, and genuine medical chanties and properly conducted 
 hospitals will suffer. To arouse the profession to the 
 danger it is incurring by the abuses of medical charity, the 
 danger of a sudden reaction whereby proper medical 
 charity will be stopped, this has been the motive I have 
 had in mind in writings upon this subject during the last 
 six or eight years. It hardly needs the saying that one 
 earnestly desiring the curing of a disease hardly wishes to 
 kill the patient, yet some foolish folk affect to think that 
 those who speak of the disease of the hospitals would des- 
 troy all hospitals as incurably diseased. The physician, 
 even of the specialty Hospitalism, hardly desires to become 
 a Reign-of-Terror guillotinist. Nothing is more divinely 
 beautiful than a noble hospital, rightly managed, and illus- 
 trating at once the science, the art, and the benevolence of
 
 HOSPITALISM. 189 
 
 medicine. But, according to the old maxim, corruptio 
 optimi pessima, and a hospital endowed by wealthy hypo- 
 crites, managed by medical advertisers, and filled by social 
 parasites, is as bad as the other is good. 
 
 In the hospitals and dispensaries of England and 
 Wales, 2,855,644 patients were treated in 1878, while in 
 1893 the number was almost four millions (3,985,263), an 
 increase of noteworthy proportions. At the same time the 
 number of physicians has, of course, also increased. In 
 1882 there was one medical man to 1703 people, whilst in 
 1893 there was one to every 1427 that is, each medical 
 man has 250 less people in his clientele. If this is true in 
 England, where medical education and medical charity 
 have preserved at least the tradition of sanity, what must it 
 be in the United States ? In order not to be charged with 
 invidiousness, let us take the experience of a foreign insti- 
 tution. I assure you, however, illustrations could be had 
 very much nearer home. St. Thomas' Hospital, of London, 
 has an annual income of $285,000, and appeals urgently 
 for more money. A writer in the Medical Press and Circu- 
 lar thus further describes the condition of this institution : 
 
 " That Hospital was chartered by Edward VI, and splendidly 
 endowed with landed estate, and up to the year 1862 it enjoyed 
 a high reputation, and, so far as I know, did its work efficiently. 
 In that year its site at London Bridge was invaded by the South- 
 eastern Railway, and the Hospital received, I think, $2,300,000 
 as compensation. That to the common mind would seem to be 
 a tidy sum with which to build a new hospital, especially as the 
 ground which it occupies was secured on the cheapest terms, 
 having just been reclaimed by the Thames Embankment, but 
 when architects and builders got, as they did, a firm hold of the 
 job, it turned out to be quite insufficient to realize their aspira- 
 tions. They succeeded in producing not only a heavy deficit, 
 but a veritable white elephant a building about twice the nec- 
 essary size, containing bed-accommodation one-third greater
 
 190 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 than could be maintained by the income of the institution, and 
 constructed in every detail in the most expensive manner. It 
 was stated by the Royal Prince at this meeting that five of the 
 wards are now empty, there being no money to keep them full, 
 but it was not mentioned by his Royal Highness that several other 
 wards are filled by paying patients, most of whom are in no 
 sense deserving of charitable relief, and ought to be in their own 
 houses, nursed and treated at their own expense, and not at the 
 expense of the charitable. 
 
 " It would not be just to blame the present administrators of 
 the Hospital for the mad extravagance of their predecessors of 
 thirty years ago, but for the financial administration of the Hos- 
 pital at the present day they are responsible, and I may ask a 
 question or two on that. I find from Burdetf s Annual that 
 every bed maintained costs 1512.37 per annum, and every pa- 
 tient admitted represents an outlay of $38.83, the highest rate 
 among the twenty-three London general hospitals save four. 
 This does not mean that the sick patient costs directly any such 
 sum, for, as far as I can make out from the figures, his mainte- 
 nance, nursing, and treatment do not consume more than one- 
 third of the amount, the remainder representing outlay in salaries 
 to officials, pensions, and other matters which are only of indi- 
 rect benefit, if at all, to the sick patient. When I find that the 
 most efficient provincial, Scotch, and Irish hospitals can and 
 do keep, nurse, and treat a similar patient all told for just half 
 the money, I am moved to ask what claim has St. Thomas' to 
 public sympathy ? Not all the royal princes, dukes, archbishops, 
 and millionaires in existence will persuade me that a hospital 
 which builds beyond its means, spends its resources like water, 
 and refuses to retrench, deserves to be subsidized with $500,000 
 or any other sum." 
 
 As to the public, every one is a teacher, and may make 
 his voice heard against indiscriminateness. I plainly tell 
 my patients, and the occasion arises nearly every day, 
 that they cannot get as good medical service at the free 
 dispensary as at the private office, and that private treat-
 
 HOSPITALISM. 191 
 
 ment is far cheaper than the treatment for which nothing 
 is paid. I think it our duty to stigmatize the hospitals and 
 give them a bad name. We can hardly exaggerate the 
 truth in this respect. Let us laugh to scorn the clap-trap 
 delusion of the masses that at the dispensary they will be 
 treated by the great Professor Bigwig, and that therefore 
 they will be better treated than by yesterday's graduate, 
 Dr. Nobody. We, of course, know the silliness of such an 
 illusion ; we know that often at the Hospital Bigwig gets 
 all the honor and young Nobody does all the work. Ten 
 to one, with his care and desire to establish a reputation, 
 young Nobody would do the better work of the two, even 
 if Bigwig had the case himself. Then there is the wasted 
 time of the patient, the crowds, the shocking surroundings, 
 the shame of being a pauper ! Let us use the blunt, brutal 
 word, and drive it into their heads hospitals and dispen- 
 saries are for paupers! It will hurt a little, but it will do 
 good. Every older physician has some younger friend 
 and colleague who needs the poor patients and their poor 
 fees. Why not do the patients and the friend a real ser- 
 vice with one word of advice ? 
 
 As to the profession, if one has anything to do with a 
 hospital, one can do not a little in the interest of discrim- 
 ination. A trained mind can learn to detect the old clothes 
 put on for the visit, the odor of whisky, the concealment of 
 ability to pay something. There should be no mincing of 
 words with such folk. Every patient caught shamming 
 should be half-insulted and unceremoniously turned out. 
 Let them go to " other places where they will be wel- 
 comed;" the " other places" will thereby secure for them- 
 selves an evil name in time, which will prove a poor invest- 
 ment. 
 
 There is one half-evil that is condemned by some 
 and practiced by many, but it has the excuse that it is 
 somewhat better than the hospital wholesale business.
 
 192 HOSPITALTSM. 
 
 The drug-store doctor is not, perhaps, the best type of pro- 
 fessional man, but he is not so bad as Professor Bigwig. 
 By the drug-store doctor I do not mean the druggist who 
 is not an M.D., but who in fact prescribes much as if he 
 were. That problem is fast settling itself by the commer- 
 cial medical college selling diplomas to the druggist. 
 What is meant is the genuine doctor who also keeps a 
 drug-store, but who charges well, nothing for advice and 
 everything for filling the prescription ! Such a product of 
 our fin de siecle medical civilization is in fact a direct reac- 
 tion and result of indiscriminate medical charity. And 
 since the doctor gets something, however roundabout, for 
 his work, I am not inclined to scold him much. When 
 hospitalism is whipped out of the field it will be time enough 
 for all good men to turn in and run out the drug-store 
 doctor. 
 
 Still another form the reaction has taken is that illus- 
 trated by the physician who, while pursuing essentially the 
 same plan as the drug-store doctor, carries it out by the 
 vice versa method. I mean the charging for advice but 
 giving the medicine gratis. This is certainly a step, nay, 
 two steps, in advance, and hits two heads well-deserved 
 and good-resounding whacks with a single shillalah. Who 
 does this at once " gets even " with the soulless hospital 
 and with the nostrum-selling, prescribing druggist, both 
 having tough skulls that need many downright doughty 
 thwacks ! Perhaps the same club may in time split wide 
 open another cranium, that of the patent-medicine man. 
 The remarkable progress in the arts of modern pharma- 
 cology makes possible, and many other reasons make justi- 
 fiable, the dispensing of one's own medicines. 
 
 In England medical clubs are already deemed unmiti- 
 gated nuisances and deplorable grievances. With us they 
 have not yet become so, but we are fast entering the same 
 smooth descensus Averni. But it seems to me even this
 
 HOSPITALISM. 193 
 
 phase of the wholesale medical business is preferable to 
 hospitalism a road, that if not to Avernus, trends toward a 
 lake into which certain tormented swine did once rush 
 somewhat hastily, with much relief to their mental dis- 
 ease. 
 
 One finally asks, Why should each physician not have his 
 own private dispensary ? Behold his empty office and his 
 unoccupied time! Why should he deimpersonalize his 
 charitable work and give himself namelessly to an institu- 
 tion a sort of a corporation which proverbially has neither 
 a body to be abused nor a soul to be saved ? Better, it 
 seems to me, and far better, would it be to do the service 
 and get the gratitude one's self. In such cases there is a 
 real and a scientific service on the physician's part, and a 
 real and not a sham gratitude on the part of the patient. 
 Private individuals should go into private competition with 
 the hospitals. The hospitals can be whipped out every 
 time. And when one corrects the botch-work of the hos- 
 pitals, the time and the health of the patient have been so 
 patently spared that the thank-offering of an unexpected 
 and shyly given fee is much larger than one would have 
 thought of receiving from a " charity-case." One may 
 perhaps hear the sneer that it would be unprofessional for 
 a hungering young doctor to solicit gratis-cases at his pri- 
 vate office and ten-to-one the sneer would come from one 
 who hangs his name on big sign-boards from his dispensary 
 doors, and advertises himself or his hospital in cheap news- 
 papers and on theater bulletin-boards. I would be far 
 from justifying advertising ways on the part of the younger 
 man, but decidedly when the advertisement of the hospital 
 means the advertisement of the men running the hospital, 
 then I excuse the young non-hospital advertiser first and 
 quickest. When Bigwig quits the trickery, young Nobody 
 will soon do so also. 
 17
 
 194 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 I would like to add a suggestion that seems never to 
 have occurred, either to our profession or to its most excel- 
 lent coworking sister, that of the trained nurse. Thousands 
 of women have heroically and successfully struggled under 
 the greatest difficulties to secure their special training and 
 ability. Thousands more are preparing, but already the 
 profession is overcrowded. Why should they not take up 
 the hospital-business as a work for which every considera- 
 tion of natural and acquired fitness shows them adapted? 
 The hospital business is a sort of a special boarding-house 
 business. I see no reason why in America we should 
 drift into the huge barracks-hospital system with droves of 
 daily thousands. The individualization of cases is the first 
 requisite of clinical wisdom, and the individualization of hos- 
 pitals is another professional desideratum. There might be 
 hundreds of single-house hospitals or homes for the sick, 
 adapted to different diseases, and to all purses, in all of our 
 cities, in which nurses should be the responsible owners or 
 controllers, and to which any physician might upon regular 
 business arrangements send his patients, and relieve him- 
 self of all except the medical responsibilities, the nurse as 
 now carrying out his orders. There is something belittling 
 I will not use a harsher word in the custom of physi- 
 cians going into the boarding-house business euphemisti- 
 cally called the private hospital or the private sanitarium. 
 The physician should not be interested in or bothered by 
 the chambermaid's work, the price of beef, or the rental of 
 rooms. This is all alien to his proper work, not seldom 
 inimical to it, and even leading sometimes to scandalous 
 conditions. But placed in the hands of a woman specially 
 educated for exactly that sort of thing, it would at once 
 elevate the dignity of her own nurse's profession, lessen the 
 shame of the impertinent and bulimic hospital, and regu- 
 late and systematize the physicians' proper labor
 
 HOSPITALISM. 195 
 
 But when all has been said and done the hospital abuse 
 will continue unless professional sentiment is aroused. 
 Trustees, professional philanthropists, and the public will 
 gladly continue to eat the oyster of medical service, and 
 leave the shells to our asinarian rivalries. Possibly there 
 will be no great and thorough cure of the evil so long as 
 we remain a divided profession, so long as local medical 
 societies never touch professional abuses and wrongs, so 
 long as censors have no moral sense and are never incensed 
 surely not so long as the American Medical Association 
 numbers as members but one in a hundred American medi- 
 cal men. As certainly also there will be no reform while 
 like a lot of unspanked school-boys the members of that 
 Association hanker after and quarrel over the right to 
 advertise nostrums and to associate with quacks, and while 
 the cynical wrap themselves in the cloak of respectability, 
 hold themselves aloof, and grin sardonically from the safe 
 retreats of success. The two immediate and demanded 
 conditions of all reform are : 
 
 1. That medical men shall have a large share in the 
 government of hospitals, thus making them responsible for 
 abuses and rendering it possible to stop this old monkey 
 trick of getting chestnuts by our stupid professional paws 
 thrust into the fire. 
 
 2. The principle of the Charity-organization Society 
 must be made a part of all hospital management. It would 
 be well if a genuine copartnership could be realized be- 
 tween the local Charity-organization Society and every 
 hospital. At least, there must be at every hospital an 
 officer whose sole duty it shall be to discriminate between 
 the worthy and unworthy and he must be made to dis- 
 criminate, too. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. From the Lancet of June 8, 1895, we learn 
 that during the year 1894 there were treated gratuitously 
 in the London hospitals :
 
 196 HOSPITALISM. 
 
 GENERAL HOSPITALS : 
 
 In-patients, 52,080 
 
 In Convalescent Homes, 5 ,585 
 
 Accidents and Emergencies, 264,379 
 
 Out-patients, number of visits, .... 1,684,448 
 
 SPECIAL HOSPITALS : 
 
 In-patients, 24,963 
 
 In Convalescent Homes, 2,526 
 
 Accidents and Emergencies, 25,660 
 
 Out-patients (visits), 1,205,688 
 
 COTTAGE HOSPITALS AND CONVALESCENT HOMES : 
 
 In-patients, 24,963 
 
 In Convalescent Homes, 39 
 
 Accidents and Emergencies, 244 
 
 Out-patients (visits), 13,858 
 
 DISPENSARIES : 
 
 Out-patients, 1,204,045 
 
 Totals, 4,508,478 
 
 The Lancet, in pitifully begging for more funds to carry 
 on this tremendous labor, notes that whereas in 1890 the 
 total number of out-patient visits was 2,429,219, in 1894 
 the number has risen to the perfectly absurd figures of 
 4,108,039. What more convincing argument could be 
 adduced for lessening the amount of subscriptions, and 
 thus, perhaps, stopping this riotous debauchery of both 
 profession and public ?
 
 THE ETIOLOGY, DIAGNOSIS, AND TREAT- 
 MENT OF THE PREVALENT EPIDEMIC 
 OF QUACKERY.* 
 
 You have all heard of the doctor who would never eat 
 roast duck because the impolite animal had always been 
 so personally insulting to him in its remarks. Doubtless 
 you may wonder if I am not also a bit impertinent in choos- 
 ing the subject of quackery as a theme of talk before 
 physicians regularly educated and presumably despising 
 irregularity and sectarian medicine with just indignation. 
 I assure you it is not because I suspect you of infidelity 
 at least of a very pronounced type. I simply wish to give 
 you a hint of the difficulties and temptations you will 
 encounter when, as physicians loyal to science and modest 
 self-respect no science, you know, without unselfishness 
 and modesty you come in sharp contact with the evils of 
 modern sham medicine. The temptation to compromise 
 will then come with subtle but decided force. I said I 
 would not suspect you of positive infidelity, but as science 
 always consists in finer discriminations and the recognitions 
 of small differences that escape ordinary observation, so, 
 with civilization, is coming the influx of a thousand grades 
 of deception and fraud. 
 
 The question is always suggested : How much of a 
 quack is he ? You may have no doubt about Sharp & Co.'s 
 Safe Cure, the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, 
 
 * An address delivered by invitation of the Faculty of the Medical Depart- 
 ment of the Buffalo University, before the Graduating Class, May 3, 1892. 
 From The Medical News, May 7, 1892. 
 
 197
 
 198 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 or the pictured old man leering at you from the theatrical 
 bulletin boards with Mephisto grin as he lovingly clasps 
 to his arms a bottle of sarsaparilla. But how is it with 
 the very great and the very regular Dr. Supersuspect, 
 who writes puffs of secret proprietary preparations, or who 
 praises one especial brand of wine after receiving a fine 
 case of "samples" as a sure cure for influenza. How 
 about Dr. Slydog, who fills his reception-rooms with 
 hospital dummies, or who makes his patients come many 
 times for the relief of a simple ailment, that if cured at once 
 would result in too small a bill or, who tells them all 
 their symptoms are very serious, but that he has caught 
 the disease just in time? Are these gentlemen quacks ? 
 
 Dear old John Phoenix complained that our use of 
 adjectives was entirely too vague. If a man were called 
 good, he wanted to know just exactly how good you 
 thought him. If " Sally who lives in our alley" should 
 be thought beautiful, is that the only adjective that could 
 be applied to Helen of Troy? John, therefore, proposed 
 to prefix a number to each adjective that should indicate 
 just the degree of perfection desired. If, in your calm 
 and dispassionate opinion, Sally is as beautiful as Helen, 
 then you would call her 100 beautiful, though perhaps 
 your friends might think her only 25 beautiful. If we 
 apply the principle to quacks, we have excellent results 
 that will enable us to ticket them with a fair degree of 
 accuracy. For instance, take the street-corner man who 
 sells Wizard Oil with negro-minstrel accompaniment and 
 four white stallions ; he gathers a lot of money from the 
 crowd and then drives off at a gallop; he is evidently a 
 100 quack, pure and simple. Take Keeley next: in order 
 not to exaggerate, let us put him at 98 or 99. Then the 
 Hahnemannian Knights, according to the degree of their 
 medical education and the weakness of their potentizations, 
 may be ranged from 95 to 97. The metaphysical Healers,
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 199 
 
 being sincere but ignorant, should find their level at 80 or 
 70 perhaps. Where must we put the " vivopaths," the 
 " physio-medicals," the " bio-chemicals," the " manupaths," 
 and all the motley crowd, unnameable, indescribable ? 
 Where should we grade the cunning fellows that are cling- 
 ing desperately to the coat-tails of respectability and medi- 
 cine, but who are neither respectable nor medical, except 
 in externals ? Surely not under 50. Where shall be 
 placed the fellows who receive "presents" from drug-stores 
 and instrument-makers, who write therapeutic articles on 
 drugs that they know nothing about, or run dispensaries 
 as feeders for the private office? Can they come nearer 
 than 25 ? Then the " brilliant-operation men " whom the 
 newspaper reporters so easily fool, the college professors 
 and hangers-on, who in blowing the collegiate horn pianis- 
 simo, opportunely emphasize the note of their own private 
 and personal trombone fortissimo ! In all such cases the 
 individual conscience must decide. 
 
 Quackery may be likened to a poor artificial eye 
 everybody else can see through it except the patient. 
 Strange beyond all strangeness is the gullibility of the 
 patient, his devotion to his duper. Populus milt decipi 
 which being modernized means, the mob loves hum- 
 bug. 
 
 But however disgusting, the fact is explainable. The 
 deep-seated grudge and suspicion of the populace for scien- 
 tific medicine and the secret love with which it turns to- 
 ward its magic-mongering humbuggers is evolutionally 
 but a survival of the time when medicine was nothing but 
 magic, an atavistic return to primitive modes of thought 
 and therapeutic superstition. And it is also profoundly 
 pathetic, an appallingly serious fact. The scientific stu- 
 dent of sociology watches the inrooting of institutional 
 weeds and fruitless brush that the future civilization must 
 grub out and burn with costly labor and sacrifice. The
 
 200 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 student of heredity and psychology sees the hardening 
 of modes of thought and habit that must bring only 
 pain, or misapplied or useless function. The sincere 
 physician sees disease permeating unborn babes, and scien- 
 tific progress crippled and unutilized by reason of popular 
 perversity. 
 
 But a further explanation of the peculiar and rejuvenated 
 power of modern medical charlatanism consists in the fact 
 that it is not only a survival of half-extinguished medieval 
 fires, flaming up with temporary and dying brilliancy, it is 
 also a " combine " with modern civilized money-making 
 and unscrupulous politics. It is not only an atavism, 
 it is also an avatarism, present-day cupidity is engrafting 
 itself upon ancient superstition, a marriage of medieval 
 magic mummery and money-making, so that the sly 
 cunning of the politician uses the stupid monkey's paw 
 to pull the chestnuts of profit out of the fire of human 
 suffering. 
 
 Nowhere else is this fact so certainly seen as in the his- 
 tory and actual outworkings of that consummate example 
 of civilized quackery called Homeopathy. An hour's study 
 of Hahnemann's works would convince any convincible 
 person that this sorry specimen of nineteenth-century 
 medievalism is a disgrace to civilization ; and yet it is fash- 
 ionable. Laughed out of Europe, it has sought and found 
 a home among Americans, infinitely receptive of every 
 form of opera bouffe whimsicality and rampant rascality. 
 If its lay adherents had the faintest conception of the hide- 
 ous absurdities on which it is built, and the trickery by 
 which it lives, they would be sickened with disgust. The 
 distinctive principles that make it differ from scientific medi- 
 cine are the following delectable Hahnemannian hocus- 
 pocuses : 
 
 I. The cause of human disease is either the " miasm " 
 of sycosis, of syphilis, or, in overwhelming proportion, the
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 201 
 
 itch.* With marvelous inconsistency, however, the origin 
 of all disease is held to be beyond the discovery of the 
 human mind, supernatural, hyperphysical, a disturbance of 
 our " dynamis " or soul life. Diagnosis of disease is, there- 
 fore, impossible, and thus the very first requisite of cure, 
 the knowledge of the cause of morbid conditions, is de- 
 clared incomprehensible and scorned. 
 
 2. The more you weaken or dilute a drug, the stronger 
 it becomes. Hahnemann's own words are: "A homeo- 
 pathic dose is augmented by increasing the quantity of 
 fluid in which the medicine is dissolved." Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, who has tried to drown this pestiferous sect with 
 logic and laughter for a quarter of a century, calculates the 
 oceans of water in which a grain of medicine must be dis- 
 solved in order to " potentize " it to suit Hahnemann. 
 Mathematically, the thirtieth " potentization " would re- 
 quire a body of water equal in amount to 480,769 worlds 
 the size of our own in which to dilute a physiologic dose 
 of medicine. Hahnemann himself could not get it "thin 
 enough," and so finally gave all medicine by the nose, by 
 " olfaction," or smelling. And yet medicine so thin as this 
 has effects that only a madman would dream of ascribing 
 
 * It is sometimes said that no man could have been so asinine as to ascribe 
 to the itch such profound powers, but using Hahnemann's own words, as 
 quoted by that most excellent writer, Prof. Nathan Jacobson, of Syracuse 
 (Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 1890), psora is the 
 only real fundamental cause and source of all the other countless forms of dis- 
 ease figuring as peculiar and definite diseases in books on pathology under the 
 names of nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, mania, melancholy, idiocy, 
 madness, epilepsy and convulsions of all kinds, softening of the bones (rha- 
 chitis), scoliosis and kyphosis, caries of bone, cancer, varices, pseudoplasms, 
 gout, hemorrhoids, icterus and cyanosis, dropsy, amenorrhea, hemorrhages from 
 the stomach, nose, lungs, bladder, or uterus, asthma and suppuration of the 
 lungs, impotency and sterility, sick headache (hemicrania), deafness, cataract 
 And glaucoma, renal calculus, paralysis, deficiency of the special senses, and 
 pains of every variety. 
 18
 
 202 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 to it. A purely inert powder like lycopodium, administered 
 in unimaginably minute doses, will, according to Hahne- 
 mann, produce 1608 distinct symptoms, covering a period 
 of fifty days. One-millionth of a millionth of a millionth 
 of a grain of common table-salt produced 1349 symptoms, 
 including headache, vomiting, cardiac and lung troubles, 
 disturbance of sight, hearing, and so on. 
 
 The method of potentization is by shaking. Hahnemann 
 would not advise above two shakings for fear of making the 
 dose too strong. The great apostle of homeopathy, Lutze, 
 in an address that has reached at least forty-two editions, 
 says that an old man was cured of persistent vomiting by 
 means of a glass of water that Lutze had magnetized by 
 simply holding it in his right hand.* 
 
 3. To cure a disease, give a medicine that in a well per- 
 son would cause the disease, or Something as near to it as 
 possible, that is the holy nonsense of similia similibus cu- 
 rantur. By a grain of a drug diluted in millions of oceans 
 of water, you are supposed to substitute a drug-disease for 
 the natural disease; and the "instinctive vital force" will 
 turn and "go for" the natural disease, because the vital 
 .force has, as it were, been made mad and spurred on by 
 the drug disease.f 
 
 * He concludes " that if pure water can be so enriched in medicinal virtue 
 by simple contact with the hand as to cure a disease of years' duration, how 
 much more must this power grow if a properly diluted drug, whose peculiar 
 powers experience and provings have taught, be subjected to constant shakings 
 in the hand until it becomes enormously efficient." Further, he says : " The 
 poisonous properties are removed from a drug through its dilution, while its 
 special peculiarities, so to speak, its soul, remains, and by rubbing and shaking 
 becomes vivified and strengthened by human magnetism." 
 
 f Hahnemann's own words again : " By administering a medicinal potency 
 exactly in accordance with the similitude of symptoms, a somewhat stronger, 
 similar artificial morbid affection is implanted upon the vital power, deranged 
 by a natural disease ; this artificial affection is substituted, as it were, for the 
 weaker similar natural disease (morbid excitation), against which the instinct-
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 203 
 
 It is worthy of this lunatic medicine that, reeking with 
 medievalism, it should claim to be the " new school," and 
 call " old school " that system which, by instruments of 
 precision, bacteriology, experimental research, and a hun- 
 dred scientific methods of which no homeopathist ever 
 originally dreamed, is endeavoring to cure and prevent 
 disease. It is worthy of this new school that it should 
 pretend to practice Hahnemannism, while secretly using 
 any medicinal agents and in physiologic doses. Made 
 according to Hahnemann's theories, made as it is to-day 
 pretended they are made, one could harmlessly eat a 
 stomachful of their sugar pellets, supposed to be deadliest 
 poison. 
 
 Not an instrument of precision, not a bacillus, not a 
 ptomain or leucomain, not a single measure of genuine 
 therapeutics or experimental research, not a single dis- 
 covery of the thousands that make up the body of modern 
 scientific medical truth and power, not one, not one was 
 ever discovered by a homeopath. Their greatest discovery 
 I know of is that the human iris, by its tints and fleckings 
 and colors, denotes the parts and the particular ailments or 
 wounds of the patient's body diseased or injured.* I have 
 the recent catalogue of a homeopathic drug store in New 
 
 ive vital force, now only excited to stronger effort by the drug affection, needs 
 only to direct its increased energy; but, owing to its brief duration, it will soon 
 be overcome by the vital force, which, liberated first from the substituted arti- 
 ficial (drug) affection, now again finds itself enabled to continue the life of the 
 organism in health." The wondrous clearness, logic, and correspondence with 
 the facts of pathology herein displayed make the statement a fitting corner- 
 stone for a lot of lunatics and sharpers to build a system of philosophy and 
 medicine upon ! 
 
 * Die Iris, nach den neuen Entdeckungen des Dr. Ignaz von Peczely ; 
 also, Die Augendiagnose des Dr. Ignaz von Peczety, etc. ; von Emil Schlegel, 
 Tubingen, 1887. Spots in parts of the iris, according to location, mean 
 wounds of the ear, the shin, a syphilitic tumor, lung-disease, prolapse of the 
 uterus, etc., etc.
 
 204 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 York, in which, to-day, among thousands of filthy things, 
 or rather names of things, offered for sale are the following 
 " morbific products, nosodes," etc., offered in high potencies : 
 
 " Lice insects," either of the three varieties: " serpents," 
 " tarantulas," and " crickets." You can buy bottled sun- 
 light, nay, the sun himself; or you have the choice of the 
 blue rays, the yellow rays, bottled galvanism, or faradic 
 electricity, etc. " Snow " and " ice," or " moonlight " or 
 the " east wind," are at your command for ten cents a 
 ' graft;" it is not the germs or material particles, but the 
 disease itself Bright's, catarrh any that you will ; but you 
 can also have the " pus from a carbuncle," from " Pott's 
 disease," etc. You can buy " Brahma " himself, it seems ; 
 or, if you are sad, you can, for ten cents, have " tears of a 
 young girl in great grief and suffering; " the " salt of the 
 brain secreted from a gentleman's scalp with the perspira- 
 tion ; " a silk handkerchief eaten by a cow and taken from 
 the stomach in a hard ball ; during the three years she 
 never had a calf." One of the most interesting and sug- 
 gestive items of the catalogue is simply entitled " Omnia." 
 
 If one quotes Hahnemann or the elder homeopathists, 
 the Hahnemannians say " this is misrepresentation," and 
 that " in modern progress we have advanced beyond all 
 that." And if one quotes the modern homeopathists more 
 versed in the art of mystification, but at heart equally 
 absurd, it is said these do not represent true homeopathy. 
 I have quoted both ancient and modern somewhat exten- 
 sively, not because I have any special grudge against this 
 School far from it but because its adherents are the 
 most numerous and coherent body of sectarians, and be- 
 cause they have succeeded, in this quack-ridden land, in 
 befuddling so many people, sensible in other matters. In 
 a simple commercial sense, I ask, would it pay to publish 
 catalogues and offer for sale combined middle-age filth and 
 modern rascality, if there were not buyers ?
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 205 
 
 To-day there are in 53 "institutes" some 8000 pitiable 
 victims of sin, forming four times a day in 53 lines ("jab- 
 time") to receive from renegade medical graduates (hired 
 servants of an ignorant charlatan trading upon the name 
 of medicine) the hypodermatic injection of a secret sub- 
 stance. They are guaranteed a permanent cure of their 
 disease, and yet a large proportion have gone through the 
 cure more than once, and a large proportion of those 
 never returning a second time, relapse. Despite the 
 medical, physiologic, and literary barbarism of the Keeley 
 pamphlets, despite the indirect fiendish cruelties of the 
 system (to friends of patients who ruin themselves to raise 
 the money those who can't pay the $100 "may," as at 
 least one of the superintendents said, " go to hell !") 
 despite this and the secrecy, there are men, otherwise 
 sharp-witted and intelligent, who are crazy in advocacy of 
 this pernicious filth. The whole affair illustrates well the 
 popular distrust in scientific medicine, and the popular 
 belief in a magical short-cut to health by therapeutic miracle. 
 Young Men's Christian Associations, which would not 
 think of listening to a scientific lecture on the results and 
 cure of chronic alcoholism, open their doors to this mon- 
 strous guller, and the Jay Gould of the preaching business, 
 from a supposedly Christian pulpit, calls for God's bene- 
 diction on the most unchristian of deviltries. With a 
 hound's chorus of a thousand newspapers, the Chicago 
 Tribune leads in this infamous exploitation of the poor 
 drunkard. So Perkins's tractors sprang into popularity, and 
 so, after the speedy burial of this delusion, others will 
 periodically spring up in obedience to popular superstition, 
 prodded and nursed by cunning Mephistophelianisrn. 
 
 The danger of medical lunacy overtaking the people is 
 again illustrated by the vogue of the creed of the sorry folk 
 termed metaphysical or divine healers, Christian Scientists, 
 Faith or Mind Curers. Would you think it possible that
 
 206 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 people right here in the United States, among us to-day, 
 could believe that " it is impossible that a boil is inflamed 
 or painful," and that inflammation, hemorrhage, and 
 decomposition are but thoughts, beliefs,* and that carci- 
 noma, diphtheria, typhoid fever, what you will, can be 
 cured by prayer or thinking hard at it ? According to Dr. 
 Nichols,f there are within the limits of only one of these 
 curious sects about thirty organized churches, and also 1 20 
 societies that maintain regular services. Twenty-three 
 institutes, " scientific" and " metaphysical," are advertised 
 in one periodical. The number of practitioners " regularly 
 graduated" reaches thousands. 
 
 Or, take another national disgrace, the patent-medicine 
 shame. Even semi-barbarous countries have forbidden 
 the entrance within their limits of these vile concoctions, 
 devised to empty the pockets of the poor of money, while 
 filling their bodies with poison. Any chemical analyst 
 would tell you these "non-alcoholic bitters" are made up of 
 from 25 to 50 per cent, of the vilest alcohol. Thousands 
 of poor babes have been killed by soothing syrups of 
 course, containing no opium or other hypnotic and so on, 
 so on, to the end of the list ! 
 
 What an egregious farce, that people should buy a 
 cure-all containing they do not and cannot know what; 
 compounded they do not know by whom certainly not, of 
 course, by a physician vouched for by no one an evident 
 bit of hoodooism to get money a shotgun prescription 
 fired at a disease in the abstract an unknown remedy for 
 an unknown disease from an unknown hand ! And yet the 
 millions upon millions of dollars invested in these nostrums, 
 and thereby annually filched from the ignorance and want 
 of the poorest and neediest, should arouse even the most 
 
 * " Science of Health," pp. 188, 231. 
 f Science, January 22, 1892.
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 207 
 
 corrupt of legislators to put a stop to it all. The superla- 
 tive impudence of the villainous syndicates is degrading and 
 wrecking the once noble profession of pharmacy, and 
 turning the disgust of the reader and traveler into nausea 
 by the pollution of every newspaper and of every landscape 
 with sickening advertisements. 
 
 And now, why do Keeleyism, the patent-medicine and 
 nostrum sham, the homeopathic disgrace, and a thousand 
 such things exist among us ? They are, of course, a vital 
 loss and a vital injury to the community, working a pollu- 
 tion of body upon an idiocy of intellect, by a Boss-Tweed- 
 ism of ethics. Why is our country the refuge and asylum 
 of the survival superstitions, the delirious nonsense, and 
 diabolical financial schemes that Europe has kicked out in 
 wrathful disgust ? Simply this : the newspapers, journals, 
 and magazines dare not tell the truth or be the means of 
 telling the truth. Every magazine or serial depends for 
 existence upon two sources of revenue : its subscribers and 
 its advertisers. Let a journal or paper publish an article 
 exposing the infamy, and " stop my subscription " would 
 come from a few dozen people whose pet fad is that they 
 are being persecuted, and that they, who have never stud- 
 ied such things a minute, know the truth about physiology 
 and disease that thousands of scientific men have been de- 
 ceived in finding. Hence no editor dare admit an article 
 showing up the shame and wrong of these things. Physi- 
 cians and other scientific men have nothing to sell, nothing 
 to advertise ; but all quacks, nostrum venders, and patent- 
 medicine men have something to sell, and their advertise- 
 ments form a tremendous source of revenue to every paper 
 in the land. Let any journal reveal to its readers their 
 humbuggery, and at once it is ruined. 
 
 But advertisements maligning and misrepresenting their 
 opponents are put into the reading columns as reading 
 notices, neither editor nor publisher daring to disobey the
 
 208 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 orders of the syndicates. A well-known illustration is the 
 thousand-journal denunciation and contumely, for the past 
 year or two, of the druggists who dare " substitute " for 
 the quack medicine called for similar and equally good 
 preparations at one-half the price of the more advertised 
 cure-all. 
 
 Other examples of journalistic perversity might be cited; 
 e. g., Harper's Magazine a year or two ago published an 
 article by a professional humorist, claiming that home- 
 opathy had saved modern medicine from the medieval bar- 
 barism of filthy medication and beastly therapeutics. 
 Would it insert an article showing that the reverse is the 
 truth, and that by the malicious and egregious blunder it 
 had grossly insulted every physician and scientist, civiliza- 
 tion, and truth itself? 
 
 Would the newspapers of the country, headed by the 
 North American Review, give one-hundredth of the free ad- 
 vertising to a reputable or scientific institution for the treat- 
 ment of chronic alcoholism that they have given Keeley's 
 humbuggery, and out of which that shrewd advertiser is 
 making millions of dollars? 
 
 The etiology and pathology of carcinoma is certainly a 
 deep scientific question, and yet a dashing magazine editor, 
 who had never studied it for a minute, indorses the cure of 
 a quack, Mattei, who had likewise not a scrap of medical 
 knowledge, and the people are thus gulled into spending 
 hundreds of thousands of dollars. Any medical student 
 could have exposed the fallacy, knowing how easily tumors 
 are diagnosticated as carcinomata, and thus often " cured." 
 Neither Mr. Stead nor his Italian Count care for science. 
 They have a short cut to scientific knowledge no physician 
 could have even found out by study or pathologic investi- 
 gation ! 
 
 A month or two ago, a bill, " a very moderate one," 
 and one that " the three leading and influential schools of
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 209 
 
 medicine " had recommended to the Legislature of Ohio, 
 to control the practice of medicine, was shouted down in 
 guffaws of derision by the barbaric civilized legislators of 
 that State at the command of the lobby controlled by the 
 so-called physio-medicals, the druggist, patent-medicine 
 men, and the newspapers. After this delectable piece of 
 diabolism, this same Fejee Island Legislature of Ohio 
 voted $5000 to experiment with the Keeley humbug, each 
 legislator to furnish one Keeley patient. Doubtless with 
 such men charity is to begin at home, and the patient will 
 not be hard to find ! 
 
 Charley Lamb said that the only way he could relieve 
 his feelings when he had heard a Gregorian chant, was to 
 lie down on the floor, flat on his belly, and howl like a 
 Dervish. 
 
 It is useless and tiresome to multiply examples. To the 
 honest physician the diagnosis is easy, but to the physi- 
 cian himself infected with the disease and in the incubation 
 period, the disorder is unrecognizable. He will contend 
 most vehemently that the patient is in blooming health. 
 All who wish to know the facts can easily learn them. 
 Evidence of the fallacy of the popular distrust may be seen 
 by the words of one who is certainly a competent and un- 
 prejudiced observer the present highly honored president 
 of Harvard University. 
 
 4 
 
 "It is not more than a hundred years ago that medicine 
 claimed to have been a liberal calling, an intellectual pursuit, 
 and even to-day its position as such is very inadequately recog- 
 nized by the mass of educated men. Now, I venture to say 
 that, as medical education is now given in the best schools, no 
 profession has a better right to claim the title of an educated, 
 intellectual calling, and no men have a better right to demand 
 recognition as intellectual men, as men of trained reasoning 
 faculties, than the physicians themselves. I see, in my position 
 at the head of the University, which includes the department of
 
 aio EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 liberal arts and several professional departments, that the edu- 
 cated community does not recognize this. And I exhort you. 
 gentlemen, in all your various fields of influence to do your 
 utmost to establish this just claim of the medical profession to 
 the position of an intellectual calling, and to establish the claim 
 of this great body as a body of highly trained men who use to 
 the best advantage for the community the reasoning faculty, the 
 scientific power of the human mind." 
 
 A quack is a man more interested in himself than in the 
 healing art ; caring more for his patent than for his patient ; 
 more desirous of making dollars than of curing disease. 
 A physician is one whose first thought is to cure his pa- 
 tient This is the sharp dividing line that makes the whole 
 matter clear. 
 
 There are those that say that medicine is a business, 
 that the cure of diseased people and the obviation of dis- 
 ease is a calling like any other; that the one who cures 
 best will do the best business *. e., get the most patients. 
 There is but one single comment to make to that ; it is a 
 lie, and the man who says it knows he is a liar. I beg of 
 you, if you are entering the medical profession with such 
 ideas in your heads and such intentions in your hearts I 
 beg of you, leave the profession to-day. You will be poor 
 physicians, you will die ashamed of yourselves, you will 
 disgrace a noble calling, and you will hinder civilized pro- 
 gress. I assure you this universe is not put up that way ! 
 You may make some money, perhaps, but the same devil- 
 try applied in politics or bucket shops will get you much 
 more of the stuff you seek. We have a wretched super- 
 abundance of such fellows now to watch. A large share 
 of the energy of good men is already used up in neutraliz- 
 ing their malice and thwarting their cunning. You will do 
 far better by running for alderman, dealing in green goods, 
 or in anything except in the health and confidence of 
 afflicted human beings. That is a work fitting only to
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 211 
 
 those who recognize other ideals and purposes than selfish- 
 ness and money getting. The acceptance by you of your 
 diplomas this day pledges and consecrates you to a mission 
 among your fellow-men that is truly holy. How far you 
 are to be above trade is clearly shown by the fact that the 
 chemist as near a physician as he is can without dis- 
 honor patent drugs and reap exclusive pecuniary gain from 
 the learning and ingenuity of his brain but you may not 
 do this. In a close analysis the work of the chemist and 
 scientist is due humanity as much as is yours ; every de- 
 vice and improvement of civilization withheld from public 
 use or sold dearly is trading in people's lives, is a sin 
 against the race but only you, yours alone of all the call- 
 ings, must realize the fact in every-day life. It is a glori- 
 ous honor to belong to the profession of which that can 
 be said. But the honor only comes to them that are will- 
 ing to be unknown as honored, who find the reward in 
 doing the work, and in the secret satisfaction of a silent, 
 happy, and peaceful conscience. 
 
 But with the professional honor and beatitude coexists 
 the professional duty. There is the greatest danger that 
 the men who believe that medicine is a business will have 
 their way, and sink professional standing to the level of 
 politics and trade. Will you join them or will you oppose 
 them ? The whole of your life will be the answer, and this 
 answer will largely consist in your attitude to quackery. 
 Dr. H. C. Wood says that as few or no homeopaths to-day 
 believe or practice the Hahnemannian clap-trap, they have, 
 ipso facto, suicided, become in a sectarian sense non-ex- 
 istent, and that on our part we may ignore the fictitious 
 distinction and fraternize with them. The President of the 
 Philadelphia County Medical Society advises letting them 
 into our medical societies. A prominent weekly medical 
 journal of New York smiles very graciously at the sectarian, 
 and a good friend of mine, an editor of a high-standard med-
 
 212 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 ical journal, tells me that in his city consultations with a 
 sectarian are very common, and go unrebuked by physi- 
 cians otherwise in good standing. 
 
 In other words, after centuries of struggle and with vic- 
 tory in our hands throw it away in a fit of avariciousness, 
 cowardice, and weariness. The gentlemen quoted doubtless 
 mean well, but the advice is unconsciously traitorous to 
 humanity and to the medical profession. If the advice be 
 followed, we shall fall back again into what the printers call 
 pi, and out of this general debasement moral physicians, 
 as individuals, will again have to raise themselves above 
 the re-commercialized mass, and with century-long struggle, 
 reform again a new guild, with precisely the same ideals 
 and aims as that we poltroons had destroyed. 
 
 It cannot escape the observation of anyone who wishes 
 to see facts as they are, that the great mass of homeop- 
 athists, by pure necessity, have in practice entirely aban- 
 doned the whole crazy nonsense of Hahnemannian mumbo- 
 jumbo, and cling only to the name for purely commercial 
 reasons. The great homeopathist, Guernsey, he probably 
 who supplied " Dr." Swan with his sample or graft of " ca- 
 tarrhus nasi," says that there is in New York City, to-day, 
 no exclusive homeopathic practitioner. Any fool knows 
 that no disease can be influenced or cured by the medieval 
 drivel of potentizations, shakings, smellings, similias, etc. 
 But a lot of silly women have got it into their heads that 
 this is a "nice" and a "new" school, and these mounte- 
 banks, while giving common drugs in physiologic doses, 
 are willing to sail under false colors for the sake of the 
 practice it brings. It is a sickening fact, but fact it is. 
 
 What is the treatment of this veritable and terrible con- 
 tagious disease quackery ? How shall you meet it ? 
 What are you going to do about it? Compromise? The 
 suggestion recalls Hugo's famous monosyllabic fighter at 
 Waterloo.
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 213 
 
 Instead of the ninety thousand surrendering to ten thou- 
 sand, suppose the ninety thousand learn a lesson. 
 
 Combination is the order of the day in the world of trade. 
 What is thus done for selfish reasons may be done for un- 
 selfish ones. The patent-medicine men have got every 
 druggist and every newspaper in America in their deter- 
 mined grip. The homeopathists meet in National and In- 
 ternational conventions, and devote their entire energies 
 and time to schemes for getting State and Governmental 
 money and aid, and for grasping every point of pecuniary 
 and social advantage. In our lofty scorn of such low cun- 
 ning, and in our intense preoccupation with disease and its 
 cure, we never raise a ringer toward meeting such attack, 
 never pass a resolution to set Legislatures right, never try 
 to instruct the public in its medical duties and self-interest. 
 If as a profession we did but devote a tenth of our collect- 
 ive energy and intellect to these things, quackery would 
 disappear. The medical profession is shut within itself. 
 It has no means or machinery for reaching the public ear. 
 The few thousand quacks occupy the field ; the public 
 hears from them always and emphatically. 
 
 Realize the condition of the farmer and workman, un- 
 educated, undiscriminating. These are the bulk of our 
 people. With almanacs and circulars and million-fold de- 
 vices, the advertisements, fictitious certificates, and false 
 promises of the nostrum-traders and the quacks reach his 
 mind and feed it with subtle poison and plausible falsehood. 
 The family physician is squeezed aside, and his testimony 
 against these frauds, if he have the frankness to denounce 
 them, is credited to his jealousy. The medical profession 
 has scorned to devise machinery to reach these people and 
 to open their eyes to the humbuggery. By the great mass 
 of the people the medical profession is looked upon with 
 contempt or ill-will, its members to be called in dire neces- 
 sity, its bills paid grudgingly. The bottles of the cure-all
 
 214 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 meet the physician's eye in every household. Every State 
 and National medical congress or organization should have 
 a literary bureau, the local physician as the local agent, to 
 instruct the people in physiologic, sanitary, and medical 
 duties, and to neutralize the pernicious influences at work. 
 It should not be held beneath our dignity to make a popu- 
 lar but honest and instructive medical almanac for popular 
 distribution. 
 
 The American Medical Association and the Congress of 
 American Physicians and Surgeons, every State and every 
 medical society, should pronounce as bodies upon the great 
 questions affecting the health of the public. Legislators 
 think we do not care, that we have no power. The quacks 
 have their ears and fill them. There are a hundred great 
 public duties we are leaving undone when, if we but spoke 
 as a profession, medical and sanitary progress would sweep 
 on to certain victory. It is, let us hope, only a question 
 of time. In the riot and intoxication of the rich conquest 
 of American advantage, Democracy thinks that every out- 
 rageous form of delusional crankery must have its swing 
 and chance to rule or ruin. But that day is fast passing 
 away. We must now settle down to the hard work of 
 governing and civilizing. When the Prince Hal of Democ- 
 racy becomes the King of Civilization he must henceforth 
 scorn the Falstaffs of quackery and scatterbrained tomfool- 
 ery. So in your case when the Student Hal becomes the 
 Practitioner King beware that you be not tempted to think 
 that the aim of your life, professional success, will come 
 more quickly by compromise with quackery and trickery 
 methods. There is no doubt of the fact : if you are after 
 quick success you will find it that way. But this plan 
 has three disadvantages 1 : you will not find enduring 
 success, you will not be self-satisfied and morally strong, 
 and you will not gain the love and honor of your fellow- 
 men.
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 215 
 
 To be explicit and detailed, let me counsel a few 
 " don'ts : " 
 
 1. Don't be in a hurry for success. 
 
 2. Don't consult or fraternize with quacks of any kind 
 or degree. 
 
 3. Don't be afraid of speaking out your denunciation of 
 quackery, regardless of the loss of a few possible patients 
 and the charge of jealousy. 
 
 4. Don't support medical journals run in the interests 
 of the advertisers, journals that are muzzled, that are con- 
 ciliatory to or nondenunciatory of quackery. 
 
 5. Don't sign a single certificate so long as you live, as 
 regards special, proprietary, or secret preparations. 
 
 6. Don't write a medical article in which such prepara- 
 tions are praised or even mentioned. 
 
 7. Don't accept commissions or presents from druggists, 
 manufacturers, opticians, or surgical-instrument dealers. 
 
 8. Don't let any professional allusion to yourself, your 
 opinions, or your work get into the lay newspapers. Don't 
 be a sneak advertiser, a " newspaper doctor." 
 
 9. In your own righteous wrath against quacks outside 
 of the profession, don't forget that there are many within 
 the profession, and that they are the most despicable true 
 wolves in sheep's clothing. I would rather be the 
 " Wizard King of Pain," and buy affidavits of impossible 
 cures at twenty dollars each, than a respectable hypocrite 
 indirectly or secretly hobnobbing with newspaper reporters 
 and supplying them with " data." 
 
 As physicians charged with the health of the present 
 and future, our duty must become clear: the entire witch's 
 Sabbath of 'pathies and 'isms, the morbid cranks, drunk 
 with ignorance and conceit ; the sly cunning of advertis- 
 ing schemers, the tricks and frauds of medical parasites to 
 suck the blood of their dupes, the patent medicine disgrace 
 all these things must be choked out of existence. It is
 
 216 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 a warfare, not a compromise, we are entering upon. It 
 is not a theory, it is a condition that confronts us. 
 
 Another need is for individual instruction of people. 
 People are wofully ignorant, medically, and we have been 
 shuffling and cowardly. When a nice little foolish woman 
 or a pig-headed man with arched eyebrows and self-satis- 
 faction tells me, " Oh, I belong to the new school," I at 
 once say, Ach, so ! the very school I belong to but, we 
 differ as to what the new school really is. Excuse me, do 
 you have the itch ? Do you believe that your eau-de-Co- 
 logne gets stronger by shaking it, and that if you shake it 
 in a peculiar manner too many times it will get stronger than 
 aqua fortis ? Do you believe your ink will get blacker, or 
 your whiskey stronger the more water you put in it? Do 
 " ink-grafts " and Cologne "grafts " work? Do you believe 
 in watching the way the toe-nails grow for a year after 
 taking a bit of vegetable carbon toasted bread as symp- 
 toms of disease and evidences of drug-power? Do you 
 believe the only safe way of taking medicine is by smell- 
 ing it? Did you, as a boy, find that stomach-ache from 
 eating green apples was cured by eating green currants? 
 If you don't believe any of these things, you are a sensible 
 person, not a Hahnemannian. These and such things are 
 the only things that can be called Hahnemannian. If you 
 don't believe them, do you think it honest or manly to pre- 
 tend to believe them for the sake of a few dollars, and 
 sneakingly, hypocritically practice medicine much the 
 same as physicians do, giving common drugs in physio- 
 logic doses? 
 
 I have been surprised to see how a few minutes' talk 
 with such people makes it plain to them what silly fools 
 they have been, and how egregiously they have been 
 duped. I have looked about for some scrap of literature 
 I could hand to these folks, to show them what roaring 
 nonsense they unwittingly gave their assent to. Oliver
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 217 
 
 Wendel] Holmes's little skit is almost the only such thing. 
 Convinced, however, that people need and will profit by 
 simple instruction honestly, plainly, justly put before them, 
 I wish to have a little pamphlet prepared that, historically 
 and actually, will show up the ridiculous pretensions of 
 modern homeopathic practice. I shall, therefore, postpone 
 a bit of private pleasure I had planned, and offer a little 
 prize of $100.00 for the best essay on the subject.* 
 
 Such a monograph supplied as a missionary tract for 
 gratuitous distribution by physicians, at the cost of print- 
 ing, would set thousands of people straight, and would 
 soon stop the legislative and financial Governmental sup- 
 port of this trumpery. I wish some millionaire would 
 give me a few hundred dollars to offer as prizes for other 
 missionary tracts, e. g., on the " Patent-Medicine Evil ; " 
 " The Reasons Physicians Do Not Advertise ; " " Why 
 Physicians Do Not Patent Instruments, Drugs, Etc. ; " 
 " The Duty of the Government and State to Medicine ; " 
 " Everbody's Medical Duty ; " " The Desirability of a 
 Higher Standard of Medical Education," etc. What a 
 disgrace that we cannot get Governmental aid for payment 
 of meat and milk inspectors, boards of health, bacterio- 
 logic and hygienic institutes, etc., etc., whilst the people's 
 money can be filched from them to support arrant quackery. 
 What a disgrace that patent-medicine syndicates can draw 
 many millions every year from the diseased, deluded, and 
 poverty-stricken of our people, with a Governmental tax 
 
 *An essay should not contain over 15,000 words, and in simplicity and 
 directness should be adapted to the commonest lay understanding. Papers 
 should be sent me on or before January I, 1893, type-written, without the 
 name of the author, but accompanied by a sealed letter, giving the author's 
 name with motto or nom-de-plume. The essays will be given to a competent 
 committee, and when their decision is reached the sealed letters of the authors 
 will be opened, and the prize sent the winner. The essay will then be 
 cheaply but well printed in large quantities, and supplied physicians at the 
 cost of printing. 
 19
 
 218 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 of only 25 per cent, upon their mixtures, whilst the same 
 people must pay a tax of 60 per cent, upon microscopes, 
 and one of 49^ cents a pound and 60 per cent, besides 
 upon woolen clothing. 
 
 The physicians of the civilized world are to day working 
 for the public welfare with a zeal and intelligence, combined 
 with an unselfishness, that no other profession, trade, or 
 calling can faintly rival. Think, first, that these men are 
 almost furiously seeking by hygiene and prophylaxis to 
 render their own calling useless and superfluous, themselves 
 occupationless. That is a fact so strange as almost to seem 
 unnatural in these days of self-seeking, class-legislation, 
 trusts, and combines. 
 
 Notice, again, that every instrument, discovery, drug, or 
 invention brought out that will do any good to humanity 
 is at once and unreservedly given to the world. No phy- 
 sician ever patents or keeps secret any discovery or inven- 
 tion. Compare that with the world's way. 
 
 Reflect, thirdly, that all the world over every physician, 
 whenever asked, gives his services to the poor without 
 demand or without hope of compensation. Would not a 
 lawyer or a locksmith think one crazy if it were proposed 
 that he should give a large share of his time and service 
 for nothing ? 
 
 Carry the thought on. The entire tremendous labor, for 
 the benefit of the community, of keeping up the enormous 
 hospital work of all the world's cities is borne by physi- 
 .cians without a cent of pay. Are there, for example, 
 thousands of similar institutions where the poor, free of 
 charge, can get legal counsel and help ? Is there one 
 such ? 
 
 It has been the universal medical tradition, accepted 
 without a murmur, that whosoever devotes himself to the 
 healing art must gladly construe his duty in this unselfish 
 manner, renouncing the usual ideals and commercial
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 219 
 
 methods of the surrounding world. Beyond all question 
 it is a fact that a like grade of intellectual capacity, the 
 same educational preparation, and an equal amount of tire- 
 less labor in any other calling would yield a far greater 
 financial result than is secured by the average physician. 
 A great physician said, " If my son goes into the medical 
 profession, I shall cut him off with a shilling." " Why 
 so ? " " Because the profession is not appreciated by the 
 public." 
 
 It is a public misfortune, a social evil, if there is slowly, 
 subtly, but most certainly, creeping through the profession 
 the lethal poison of a lowered ethical standard. Every 
 person of the land has a selfish interest in preventing our 
 adoption of the more selfish aims and ideals of the world 
 of trade. Business men are very short-sighted if they allow 
 or encourage medicine to become a business. Whenever 
 this change shall have come about (if, alas ! it should), and 
 medical success is sought by the prevalent rules of trade, 
 then the degradation will be irreparable, one of the noblest 
 of offices will have become as corrupted and salable as 
 those of politics, and an engine of incalculable good to 
 humanity will have been hopelessly wrecked. 
 
 Could one but reach their ears, how one would like to 
 appeal to the general public, to legislators of a serious- 
 minded type, if such there be, to the better class of inde- 
 pendent journals, to the more thoughtful of literary men, 
 to the rulers and teachers in colleges and universities, to 
 careful and prudent business men even, to patriots and, 
 lovers of humanity, all. This malicious and stupid miscon- 
 ception ; this non-recognition of, and opposition to, the 
 true work and worth of modern scientific medicine ; this 
 hectoring and bullying of physicians in all their aims for 
 the public good ; this cordial support of all legislative and 
 sordid schemes of cranks and quacks- is a social menace 
 and a common danger. It is long past the time that this
 
 220 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 
 
 suicidal debauchery should have been stopped. To all 
 good citizens it should be protested : This is your affair, 
 not ours. It is as much a national sin as slavery, monopoly 
 or class-legislation, vote-buying, the liquor-corruption, or 
 city-luxury more than a sin, it is a moral disease of the 
 body politic, and such disease is an expensive luxury. It 
 costs untold money, suffering, and human lives. Every 
 physician knows of many deaths directly due to quackery, 
 but the indirect deaths and consequences are incalculable. 
 Quackery kills thousands to hydrophobia's one. The 
 silent scourges are the great ones those that cut off single 
 lives slowly but ceaselessly. It becomes for you every day 
 more and more a question of self-protection and self-interest. 
 It is not, as you seem to think, a huge joke, but it is your 
 health, your life, your future, that you are trifling with. 
 Every epidemic of any contagious disease, to put it in the 
 crudest way, means the waste of millions of dollars of lost 
 time, of expensive sickness, and of grievous death. In 
 these United States hundreds of thousands of needless 
 deaths are annually taking place needless, because you 
 will reach no helping hand to physicians to carry out 
 the preventive measures, discovered and well known to us. 
 In these same States, still other millions of years of sick- 
 ness and millions of deaths are going to occur during the 
 next few years, again because you will not aid the medical 
 profession to search out other at present unknown sources 
 of disease. There are plenty of possible Kochs and Pas- 
 % teurs among American young men, if you cared, as they 
 do abroad, to help find them instead of laughing at them, 
 killing them with indignity and distrust, whilst feasting and 
 honoring your beloved charlatans. Are your charlatans 
 founding institutes of bacteriology and preventive medicine ? 
 Are they trying to probe the mystery and prevent the 
 mockery of disease ? Has it been the quacks that have 
 builded the noble new home of which city and profession
 
 EPIDEMIC OF QUACKERY. 221 
 
 are proud, for the trinity of great schools of Medicine, 
 Pharmacy, and Dentistry, of your beloved Buffalo Univer- 
 sity ? Are you wise as a nation, if, like the old persecu- 
 tors, you martyrize those who are your truest, most service- 
 able friends ? For the sake of the simplest selfishness, for 
 the love of your children, for the sake of civilization and 
 humanity, for God's sake, let us turn away from the folly 
 and sin of this trifling, and enter at last upon the ways that 
 lead to HEALTH !
 
 THE UNTRUSTWORTH1NESS OF THE LAY 
 PRESS IN MEDICAL MATTERS.* 
 
 Unless the writing be a verbatim quotation from a 
 medical journal it is quite impossible for an educated 
 physician to finish the reading of an article on a medical 
 subject in a nonmedical journal without a smile either of 
 contempt, of amusement, or of both combined. A strange 
 fatality seems to attend the filtration of medical facts 
 through the lay editorial and reportorial mind. Not long 
 since, the editor of one of the most popular and respectable 
 magazines, with puzzling injudiciousness, allowed a profes- 
 sional humorist the use of his columns to prove that the 
 quintessential nonsense and mummeries of medieval 
 therapeutics had been extinguished solely by the power of 
 so-called homeopathic rationalism and science. By reason 
 of this exquisite illogicality the humor of the sketch to 
 discriminating minds was greatly but unconsciously height- 
 ened. In a recent number of one of the best of English 
 magazines, an author and the editor evidently thought 
 that they were firing at the slow-going medical profes- 
 sion a discovery of vast importance as to the resuscitation 
 of asphyxiated persons. What was new in the discovery 
 was not true, and what was true was by no means new. 
 Had we space we could adduce from recent journals of 
 otherwise good reporting-ability a score of examples of 
 most egregious and not infrequently amusing misrepresen- 
 tation. We complain, so far, of no intentional misinforma- 
 
 * From the Medical News ; November 21, 1891. 
 
 222
 
 THE LAY PRESS. 223 
 
 tion, but wish only to emphasize the fact that with the best 
 ability and intention the result is ludicrously inaccurate and 
 the mind of the ordinary reader is filled with half-truths 
 and untruths that perpetuate the proverbial and frightfully 
 inaccurate jumble of opinions as to medicine held by the 
 ordinary individual. 
 
 If we descend from the better class of carefully edited 
 serials to the preposterous Sunday newspaper and the out- 
 rageous advertising sheets supplied Master Demos, we are 
 at once confronted with a farrago of unmedical travesties 
 of medical knowledge quite. beyond adequate description 
 and worthy vilification. Here begins an ignorance that is 
 far more than culpable and a misrepresentation that is at 
 once venal and shameless. 
 
 Even in many of the best papers the power of the patent- 
 medicine man, the World's Therapeutic Institute, and the 
 advertising agent is supreme. The profitable advertise- 
 ment closes the editorial mouth or opens it with a prompt- 
 ness that is comparable only to that of a rigid mechanism 
 responding to a preordained stimulus. The most striking 
 exemplification of this has lately occurred. From one 
 boundary of the United States to all the others almost 
 every newspaper of this broad democratic land has been 
 repeating as news and howling as editorial judgment the 
 echoings of a certain hired advertiser's agent of the patent- 
 medicine fraternity, denouncing and abusing the poor drug- 
 gist who should dare to offer his customer any preparation 
 other than the " patented " cure-all the poor over-adver- 
 tised dupe of a customer had asked for. The " substitution 
 evil " has been cursed and spat upon with all the wrath of 
 all the money of all the patent-medicine syndicates of all 
 the Americas. What are the facts? A set of sharpers 
 compound some secret mixture, good or bad, of drugs and 
 syrups, and, relying upon the gullibility of people, in order 
 to reap millions, they purchase the press with an odd
 
 224 THE LAY PRESS. 
 
 hundred thousand dollars' worth of advertisements. The 
 booby dupe calls at the drug store for the cure-all. The 
 druggist cannot make a cent on the patented and adver- 
 tised article, so completely has the advertiser got him in 
 his grip. But the druggist knows the ingredients of the 
 mixture, and knows the advertised article is sold at an 
 enormous profit to the advertiser. He is equal to the 
 emergency and mixes his own unpatented medicine, truth- 
 fully guaranteeing it in every way as good as that of the 
 patentee, and with a fair profit to himself he can sell it at 
 half the price of the advertised and patented article. In 
 a commercial sense he is doing perfectly right, and every- 
 body but the owner of the secret article must wish the 
 druggist well in his hard lot in thus fighting fire with fire. 
 But in hounding the druggist as a scoundrel the general 
 press has shown most superbly how its opinions in medical 
 matters are anything but useful to the community. Could 
 a single one of these guardians of public morality be counted 
 on to help tell the world what a disgrace to civilization the 
 entire vile patent-medicine business is ? 
 
 The query arises as to the possibility of setting this 
 right, of the possibility of so stating medical truths that 
 the common intelligence may be able to understand them, 
 and of the duty and responsibility of medical men in thus 
 molding and clarifying the lay mind about these things. 
 Other departments of science have their plebificators, their 
 professional popularizers of knowledge, and in every other 
 sphere attractive handbooks and simple expository treat- 
 ises are continually multiplied, which, without distortion 
 and mystification, put even the most unlettered att entrant 
 with the latest discoveries and the most abstract of scien- 
 tific truths. Why is it that that which pertains most vitally 
 to the welfare of each and every person is left untouched 
 and the unprofessional mind allowed to grope in a gloomy 
 twilight of fancy, prejudice, and ignorance? The continu-
 
 THE LAY PRESS. 225 
 
 ance of this condition of the lay mind is the essential and 
 almost sole reason that quackery, medical superstition, and 
 medical sectarianism are of such prolific growth. Ignorance 
 and misinformation are the manures of these sad weeds. 
 
 Among many there are three principal methods whereby 
 the profession may counteract the malicious influences at 
 work : 
 
 1. A persistent endeavor on the part of each of us to have 
 modern and scientific physiology made a more prominent 
 part of the teaching in all schools and colleges. Wherever 
 we can, we should try to influence school boards, educa- 
 tors, teachers, and trustees of educational institutions, both 
 primary and higher, to make anatomic, physiologic, and 
 hygienic courses of study a necessary part of the curricula. 
 
 2. Medical men should write for the newspapers, and 
 should compile elementary manuals that may popularize 
 medical knowledge without mutilating and rendering it 
 absurd or erroneous. We are well aware of the fearful 
 danger lurking in this advice : the license thereby given 
 the schemer to advertise his professional ability and serv- 
 ice, a danger that in the present state of professional 
 greed and public indiscrimination cannot be too sharply 
 emphasized and prophesied. But it is not an inobviable 
 danger, and its checks and preventions will, with growing 
 intelligence and morality, be speedily found. 
 
 3. The noble and marvelously effective new method of 
 general education, known as the University Extension 
 system, should be seized upon and made use of by the 
 medical profession to extend in the minds of all a correct 
 knowledge of the body and its diseases. The instrument 
 seems as if made to our hand. Professors in medical col- 
 leges, teachers of physiology, hygienists, even the humblest 
 physicians, have inexhaustible stores of correct observation 
 and knowledge for which humanity is waiting and asking, 
 and which to it would be of inestimable value.
 
 THE DISORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL 
 SCIENCE.* 
 
 One of America's well-known scientists, in charge of an 
 ethnologic exhibit at the Columbian Exposition, was asked 
 if there were no distinctive medical exhibit showing the 
 progress of medical science and art. " Progress of Medi- 
 cine !" said he, contemptuously. " There is no such a thing !" 
 From further conversation it was clear that, in the opinion 
 of the gentleman, by the term medical science is only to 
 be understood the curing of a sick person in its most re- 
 strictive sense. It may be asserted, moreover, that this 
 limited definition is that tacitly agreed upon by the general 
 scientific mind of the day. It is becoming more evident 
 that hygiene, with its hundreds of subordinate departments, 
 and its thousands of meeting-points with human life, is be- 
 coming autonomic, so far as medicine is concerned, and 
 that soon hygiene and medicine will not only be possibly 
 distinct callings, but that they will necessarily be distinct. 
 Bacteriology is also tending toward a similar autonomy. 
 In a word, to generalize the two aspects, we may say that 
 preventive medicine and curative medicine are slowly drift- 
 ing apart, each segregating into distinct fields of study and 
 activity, to be pursued less and less by the same individ- 
 ual. Even the medical profession is in various ways as- 
 senting to the breach. It is not uncommon to hear some 
 half contemptuous remark about the " laboratory doctor," 
 the " bug-man," or the " sewer-physician." 
 
 * From The Medical News of July 29, 1893. 
 226
 
 DISORGANIZATION OF MEDICINE. 227 
 
 But it remains an infinitely serious question whether 
 this is a wise movement or not. It may even be held one 
 of the most important things the profession has to ponder 
 and decide about during the .next generation. Its signifi- 
 cance is manifest in the fact that with the progress in civil- 
 ization cure must more and more yield place to prevention, 
 so that as all wise minds seek to forefend coming ill, the 
 function of the therapeutist as such must be one of pro- 
 gressively lessening influence, whilst that of the preventer 
 must be one of continuously enlarging influence. If the 
 treatment of smallpox a century ago had been the sole 
 duty of the physician, he would now find himself out of 
 work. Thus as one after another we learn the preventions 
 of diseases, the role of the therapeutist becomes more and 
 more sharply restricted with each new discovery. 
 
 It may be said that it matters not by whom or by what 
 class of men the work is done, so that the work is in truth 
 done, well done, and so that society receives the protection. 
 In answer, it should be remembered that there is a doubt 
 in the minds of many if the tendency toward differentia- 
 tion of function in our work of life is not already excessive. 
 Some specialism there must be, even much, but so far as 
 medicine goes it is agreed that all specialists must first have 
 a thorough grounding in general medicine, and that they 
 must well understand the physiologic and pathologic rela- 
 tions of the special organs and objects of their own study with 
 those of other specialists. Moreover, prevention is never ab- 
 solute, and no disease is, so far as we can judge, ever wholly 
 stamped out. Hence the curers will always have office, 
 and work to do. Prevention, too, not seldom runs, or may 
 run, into pathogenesis, and the sanitarian or bacteriologist 
 must be on the alert to see that prophylaxis shall not in- 
 directly become the origin of disease. He must be a 
 physician to keep from being a disease-producer. 
 
 A multitude of weighty reasons at once arise in the mind,
 
 228 DISORGANIZATION OF MEDICINE. 
 
 all going to show that if the two departments of curative 
 and preventive medicine become separated, each officered 
 and manned by men knowing little or nothing of the work, 
 methods, and ideals of the other, it will be the worse for 
 that society for whose welfare we labor. The consequent 
 narrowing of the physician's sphere of labor and usefulness 
 will serve to further emphasize the contempt with which 
 the populace already looks upon the doctor-world. Medi- 
 cal sectarianism will be immensely increased by it, and 
 heaven knows that few greater misfortunes could happen 
 than greater popular ignorance as to the value to the 
 world of an enlightened and powerful medical profession, 
 and of the disgrace of medical sectarianism. 
 
 Those, therefore, who shape our legislation and mold 
 popular sentiment should, we think, struggle against the 
 disorganizing tendencies of our science. The work of 
 preventing and of healing disease is essentially one work, 
 and the further apart they drift the poorer will the work 
 be done, the worse for society, and certainly the worse for 
 that part that is content to become, in the ever-narrowing 
 sense of the word, medical. It should never be forgotten 
 that Jenner, Koch, and Lister were physicians. It will be 
 a profound professional misfortune if future discoveries 
 and progress in preventive medicine shall be made by non- 
 medical men. Then will the future scientist ask, with all 
 the more reason and justified scorn, " What progress, pray, 
 is there to chronicle in medicine ? " The genuine progress 
 in medicine consists, indeed, in making medicine and 
 therapeutics unnecessary. Those who have true pride in 
 their profession will not willingly give up the work that 
 rightfully, and by inheritance, has fallen to them, but 
 while prompt to relieve the present evil and lessen bad 
 results, they will also seek to prevent the coming evil, and 
 to neutralize the causes whence flow the bad results. 
 Sanitary science, bacteriology, and all those biologic
 
 DISORGANIZATION OF MEDICINE. 229 
 
 studies that go to makeup preventive medical science must, 
 therefore, be integral parts of the curricula of every true 
 medical school ; the teachers of these branches should be 
 physicians ; the boards, National, State, or City, of public 
 health, quarantine, etc., should at least have medical repre- 
 sentatives, if not be entirely made up and governed by 
 medical men. Throughout the land every physician should 
 actively interest himself in whatever pertains to the health 
 of the community, thus showing by word and deed that it 
 is our proper function to prevent as well as to heal disease, 
 and that the two things must be done by one person, and 
 by one profession.
 
 CONCERNING SPECIALISM.* 
 
 We have lately been treated in numerous articles to 
 criticisms of specialism in medicine, varying from placid 
 censure of its most obtrusive extremes to violent denuncia- 
 tion of the very fact itself and of all its important illustrators. 
 At first we were inclined to sing in chorus. The recent 
 hypertrophy of specialism, the outrageous extremes to 
 which certain exponents have driven it, especially in 
 America, with our orifacialists, graduated tenotomists, 
 female castrationists, ossicle-excisionists, and all the rest, 
 have always loomed big before our eyes. Assent would 
 therefore be an easy task, especially when the impertinent 
 exaggeration o f morbid extremists seems to delight in 
 
 o o <-> 
 
 thrusting itself upon the attention, and insulting all sense 
 of self-control with examples of manifest evil. It may, 
 however, very properly be asked if there is no good to be 
 extracted even out of things most woful. All evil has its 
 uses at least for purposes of warning. 
 
 The first and most obvious answer to the critics we 
 mean the critics sans phrase, the delendo est Carthago fellows 
 of specialism, is that the contempt poured upon the 
 greatest extremists does not apply to the vast majority of 
 specialists. It is unjust to single out the maniacal hobby- 
 riders and sneer ex uno disce omnes. All are not alike. 
 The hobby-riders are few and exceptional ; the preponderant 
 majority do not deserve the strictures and are not affected 
 by them. It is sheer nonsense to say that the great body 
 of specialists know nothing of general diseases, that " a 
 
 * From the Medical News of September 28, 189$. 
 230
 
 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 231 
 
 man who looks only into the ear cannot see far into the 
 nose," that "they who view female life through the vagina 
 will have little respect for the stomach," that the surgeon 
 will cut rather than cure, and that for stricture of the rectum 
 the oculist will apply glasses or snip eye-tendons. The 
 people who say such things are cantankerous, and try to 
 say sharp things instead of true things. Argument by 
 epigram may be amusing, but, like government by epigram, 
 it ends nowhere or worse than nowhere. The makers of 
 mots never say the truth, only the error they impale. 
 Their desire is not to instruct or to be honest, but to make 
 people say, "How smart !" But if they wished to be truth- 
 ful instead of supercilious, careful instead of captious, they 
 would take special examples or at least types of extremism 
 and pour upon them the vials or larger vessels of justifiable 
 wrath, and not rain it upon the just and the unjust alike, 
 thereby in themselves logically and literally illustrating the 
 very indiscrimination of which they so bitterly complain in 
 others. 
 
 The tu quoque argument is usually a weak one, but in the 
 present contention it is exceptionally strong and convincing. 
 There is not a specialist in the land who does not every day 
 see instances of mistaken diagnosis (and hence of treatment) 
 upon the part of the general physician. What oculist, from 
 examination of the eyes alone, has not pointed out to the 
 general physician the existence of hitherto unsuspected ne- 
 phritis or circulatory disease? The aurist is constantly 
 emphasizing the facts of ear-disease as a cause or medium 
 of communication of septic cerebral disease, or as a result 
 of respiratory abnormalism. The daily rehearsal of trage- 
 dies in the specialist's office, plainly due to errors in diag- 
 nosis of the general physician, is pitiable. " My doctor told 
 me my headaches were due to congestion and anemia, and 
 never to let any oculist meddle with my eyes;" "he didn't 
 tell me to have my teeth looked after;" " he didn't examine
 
 232 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 
 
 my urine, although I've had pain in the back for a year;" 
 " he didn't examine my sputum, although I've had a hack- 
 ing cough for a long time," etc., etc. We do not mean, nor 
 do we think, that the general physician makes more errors 
 than the specialist ; we mean that the specialist is not the 
 only medical sinner. It is our conviction that the average 
 specialist is as much alive to the symptoms and importance 
 of systemic disease as is the average general physician, and 
 certainly no one would deny that he is also as much alive 
 to the abnormalisms of special organs other than those of 
 his specialty. We sharply emphasize the word average as 
 applied to both classes. A recent diatribe against special- 
 ism tirelessly reiterates that the present-day variety is em- 
 piric. The charge is, of course, too true of all medicine, but 
 to say that it is particularly true of specialism rather than 
 of general practice is topsyturvyism and squarely opposed 
 to a proper reading of the facts. What is the very strong- 
 hold of empiricism, what the enemy that the most extreme 
 specialism is heroically fighting to carry by storm what 
 but general therapeutics? 
 
 But if, as vehemently averred, the specialist is the super- 
 ficial empiricist and faddist, why does the general physician 
 not annihilate him? Why, instead of annihilation, does 
 he encourage the ever-increasing custom of sending the 
 specialist his patients to treat for their special diseases ? 
 The specialist's fate lies at the disposal of the family phy- 
 sician. Without reference-cases the specialist would soon 
 languish and die his supposably deserved death. A homely 
 saw says, " The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Is 
 it not plain that the family physician is learning that the 
 specialist has his uses, that he has special ability and excel- 
 lence gained by special application and experience, and that 
 in our day of the infinite division of function and profund- 
 ity of research he must often be called in to supplement 
 the general therapeutist? Has the family physician not
 
 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 233 
 
 learned by bitter experience that never again can one mind 
 encompass more than a small fraction of the knowable, and 
 that his duty to his patient is henceforth to learn where 
 and of what nature is the root of the evil, and, beyond a 
 certain range of ailments, he must advise consultation with 
 the specialist ? 
 
 There still linger about the fringes of our scientific world 
 some wonderful specimens of an antediluvian age, strange 
 stranded relics of megalosaurian vanity, or of slimy avarice 
 the quacks we mean those within the profession who 
 "treat all diseases," they who " turn no patient out of their 
 offices." Heaven help them or, rather, help their pa- 
 tients ! In the meantime, heaven not helping, the "em- 
 piric" specialist must patch up the bungler's work as best 
 he may after the "all-round man" has finished with his 
 ignorance and mistakes. It is simply maudlin nonsense to 
 contend that any one mind can longer compass or master 
 all branches of medical science. It is painfully evident that 
 any one specialty demands the most devoted application of 
 the very best mental ability and training in order to keep 
 abreast of the giant-progress of the time. The inevitable 
 and ruthless march of scientific progress has divided and 
 will continue to divide the practice of medicine into depart- 
 ments or specialties. There are undoubtedly unfortunate 
 aspects and results of this subdivision of work; they are 
 most glaring as well in other sciences as in medical science ; 
 but the law, divide et impera, is as predestined and inobvi- 
 able as gravitation, and to rail at it is utter fatuousness. It 
 is wiser to guide it rightly and utilize it shrewdly. 
 
 All critics say the specialist should enter upon special 
 work only after thorough training in general medicine, and 
 that is true ; but it goes without saying, and in its final 
 analysis it means that the schools must give a far more 
 thorough grounding in general medical essentials than they 
 do. If it means that every person must practice general
 
 234 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 
 
 medicine for ten years before taking up a specialty then 
 there is something to say on both sides of the question. 
 We are unable to see how the delivery of a thousand 
 women or the treatment of five hundred cases of typhoid 
 fever can much help one to be a better aurist, or bacteri- 
 ologist, or ophthalmologist. It is easy to demand much 
 of the young physician, ambitious, short-lived (ars longa, 
 vita brevis), and eager to be at his real life-work. He cer- 
 tainly should be consulted a little about it all. The advice 
 savors a little of the old maxim about learning to swim 
 without going near the water, or in another aspect it looks 
 like advising an experimentum in corpore vili ; but mistakes 
 in specialty-practice are hardly more expensive than those 
 in general practice. We are not advising the young gradu- 
 ate to plunge into a specialty at once ; we are contending 
 for the due weighing of circumstances, ability, training, and 
 all that. 
 
 And what does one mean by specialism ? Where will 
 one draw the line ? Should every family physician be also 
 a surgeon? Assuredly not! It is simply impossible. 
 It is to-day truer than ever that no man can serve two 
 masters, much less a dozen or two. Should every physi- 
 cian rely upon his own judgment as to refraction? Should 
 he treat obscure aural diseases? Should he be his own 
 bacteriologist ? Not in any case if he have a particle of 
 modesty, or honesty, or interest in his patient's health. 
 
 Beyond all question and despite all abuses, the rise of 
 specialism has been the condition of medical progress. 
 How many thousands, nay, millions, of people are there to- 
 day blessed with ocular health and ability to carry on the 
 duties of civilization by reason of the work of Graefe, 
 Helmholtz, Bonders, and their followers. Would any of 
 the discoveries in ophthalmology and their applications 
 have been made without the specialist? What has revolu- 
 tionized surgery but specialism ? What is now revolution-
 
 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 235 
 
 izing all medicine but the work of the specialist in bacteri- 
 ology? Has there been a single great discovery in 
 modern medicine that is not the work of the specialist, or 
 of men who, if living, would to-day be specialists ? Is 
 specialism not the absolute sine qua non of promised dis- 
 covery in the future ! 
 
 Finally, mark it well, the family physician is now quite 
 as much a specialist as anybody else, and this whole pother 
 of discussion is a mere meaningless war of words and mis- 
 understandings. The general physician does not treat 
 more diseases, perhaps even less, than the physician who 
 confines himself to a single organ. In the progress or 
 process of subdivision the generalist has become the veri- 
 est specialist. Moreover, almost every disease has or may 
 have its effects upon every special organ, and no specialist 
 who ignores general diseases, and diseases of other organs, 
 will henceforth be able to hold "the pace" set for him by 
 his broader-minded and more comprehensive rivals. Thus 
 the evils of specialism evils that we acknowledge and 
 deplore are in a fair way of curing themselves. The way 
 as advised by high authorities should not be backward, 
 but on through ! Specialists will not, cannot renounce 
 their peculiar work, and become general physicians ; science 
 and humanity cry out against such an absurdity; the 
 way through is the right way. The specialist is already 
 becoming the general physician in the sense that he knows 
 the limits of his own knowledge, and does not try to do 
 what he cannot do, but advises consultation with those 
 who can and who do know. This also the specialist 
 family-physician is fast learning, and so he is broadening 
 also into general practice, and no longer puts " drugs of 
 which he knows little into a body of which he knows less, 
 for a disease of which he knows nothing." 
 
 Theoretically the essence of the controversy and of the 
 whole matter consists in the attainment of the vantage-
 
 236 CONCERNING SPECIALISM. 
 
 ground of accurate knowledge of at least one organ, and 
 of the diseases of that organ. From this standpoint one 
 cannot worse but better survey the whole field of 
 medicine. 
 
 But the practical lesson of it all is that every one *'. e. t 
 every " specialist " shall learn to confine himself to the 
 work he is competent to do, and beyond that to advise 
 consultation with others more competent to treat certain 
 organs or diseases; and the advice to consult the specialist 
 family-physician has been, is, and will remain that very 
 frequently given by his coworker in other specialties.
 
 MEDICINE AND CITY NOISES.* 
 
 Not long since a foolish gentleman, who preferred to 
 live in New York or not to live at all, committed suicide 
 rather than to longer endure the ear-splitting noise of the 
 bells of a neighboring church. In thousands of cases peo- 
 ple are being made ill, are committing slow suicide, or are 
 being painfully and slowly killed by useless city noises. 
 Noise, then, becomes a question of health and of medical 
 importance concerning which physicians should have a 
 word to say and a duty to perform. 
 
 Scientifically, our rebellion against the noise-makers is 
 founded upon the physiologic truth that rest is necessary 
 to health, and that over-stimulation or persistent stimula- 
 tion of any organ or of all organs is essentially pathogenic. 
 Herbert Spencer secured for himself a sad sort of freedom 
 from noise by a mechanic contrivance that held some 
 kind of soft plugs or stoppers in the external auditory 
 meatuses. If there were only some method whereby one 
 could at will shut out unwelcome sound, as one can shut 
 out the light from the eyes ; if some aurist could devise 
 an artificial method a la Spencer, one that would not injure 
 the ear, he would be a great benefactor to humanity. The 
 evil done the few people that would thereby possibly be 
 burned to death or otherwise injured would be small, as 
 compared with that of the many deaths and much sickness 
 due to noise. 
 
 Sociologically, the whole community has an unrecog- 
 nized duty as regards noise that rests upon a physiologic 
 
 * From the Medical News of August 26, 1893. 
 237
 
 238 MEDICINE AND CITY NOISES. 
 
 and esthetic basis. Delicacy and accuracy of response to 
 a physiologic stimulus are the characteristic marks of per- 
 fection in an organism. Whatever prevents this is against 
 the welfare of society and progress. In this brutal noise- 
 making era, one of two things must follow the ceaseless 
 bruising of the mind by noise. Either the auditory mechan- 
 ism, and the nervous mechanism with which it is related, 
 that is, the whole mind, must become blunted in sensitive- 
 ness, crushed, and stupefied ; or it must react pathologic- 
 ally. People are, therefore, divisible into two classes : 
 those whose nervous systems and minds are becoming 
 mechanicalized, anesthetic, and brutalized, and those who, 
 thus failing to kill sense and mentality, develop disease- 
 reactions. The distinct agency of noise is to make us 
 either savage or sickly. Civilization, of which noise-mak- 
 ing is a decided component, is thus bearing in its bosom a 
 self-poison, to its own undoing. We are losing all refine- 
 ment and delicacy of the senses and are reverting to the 
 condition of the barbarian whose senses had to be pounded 
 and whipped into reaction, or we are becoming neurotic, 
 hysteric, and neurasthenic. Generally and progressively, 
 " Society " is either a crowd of the mentally stupid or of 
 the hyperesthetically morbid, and social amusement is be- 
 coming a game of battering and spurring jaded senses, or 
 of ministering to sense-diseases. 
 
 In the narrowest sense, we are medically bound to re- 
 duce the amount of noise-making, not only because noise 
 engenders disease, but also because it prevents the cure of 
 disease, or aggravates disease, very often, indeed, is the 
 immediate cause of death. In an American city like Phila- 
 delphia there are something like 3000 needless deaths, and 
 the equivalent of 6000 years of needless illness each year. 
 What proportion of this waste of life is due to noise, it is, 
 of course, impossible to say, but certainly a considerable 
 proportion is chargeable to it. The sick are in private
 
 MEDICINE AND CITY NOISES. 239 
 
 houses scattered all through the city, or in hospitals that 
 are often located in the most densely crowded portions. 
 Every physician knows how necessary quietness is to the 
 sick, and how often noise has been the last baneful influence 
 that the weakened organism could not resist, and thus the 
 controlling and distinctive cause of failure to cure. 
 
 The recklessness of production and the unnecessariness 
 of modern city noises are disgustingly astonishing. The 
 worst of it is that they are even kept up throughout the 
 night. If the night, at least, were kept quiet, and the 
 organism were thus given periods of repose, it would not 
 be so impossible to preserve normality of sense-reaction 
 and sanity of mental reaction. In Philadelphia one or a 
 dozen drunken brawlers may make the night hideous with 
 howl and curse and obscenity. Remonstrance with the 
 policeman elicits a smile, with ill-concealed contempt for 
 the remonstrant as a crank, and the avowal that he has no 
 authority to interfere. In Philadelphia it is illegal for 
 locomotive-engineers to blow whistles, and yet all night 
 long sleep, at least in summer, is to healthy ears and minds 
 impossible by reason of this ear-splitting curse. Street-car 
 bells rung all the time (by horses or by wheels) are no 
 protection to the public, and yet the public submits to the 
 horrible nuisance. The laying of railway-tracks and the 
 paving of streets at night are only necessary for the ad- 
 vantage and profit of mercenary corporations, and yet the 
 authorities have no power, or do not assert it, to repress 
 the evil. If our freedom-loving American submits to the 
 dictation of his tyrant and master as to trolley-cars, his 
 master puts down the new tracks at night, with fiendish 
 noises, and will by and by run the cars with the still more 
 fiendish and ceaseless noises. 
 
 From whatever aspect the subject be considered, it seems 
 strange that people will submit to the indignities of the 
 noise-makers. A thousand are outraged in order that one
 
 240 MEDICINE AND CITY NOISES. 
 
 or a few may possibly be benefited. The shrieking of 
 whistles and the ringing of bells to notify workmen to 
 stop or to start work is an instance in point. Everybody 
 has a watch or a clock at hand. Why, then, blow the 
 whistles ? Why, also, thunder or jangle bells to tell people 
 that should be asleep what o'clock it is during the night ? 
 The 10 per cent, of people who go to church must be 
 warned by bells ; but have the 90 per cent, no rights who 
 do not need or heed ? and what about the sick ? The 
 milkman arouses a whole neighborhood in delivering a 
 quart of milk. The cartmen, the peddlers, the hawkers, 
 the ragmen, etc., bawl and howl to be heard half a mile 
 away if some other greater noise near by do not drown 
 their voices. There are persons that think it strange that 
 barking dogs and crowing roosters in a city should be 
 objected to. 
 
 All noises may be divided into the necessary, the par- 
 tially necessary, and the wholly superfluous. The makers 
 of the last class of noises should be proceeded against in 
 the interests of the public health by all the forces and with 
 all the vigor at the command of physicians. And this by 
 all odds is the largest and most injurious class of noises. 
 Here is a worl* ready for the Associations for the Public 
 Good. There is something particularly exasperating and 
 baneful about the unnecessary noise in the very fact of its 
 unnecessariness. Let all the loafing rowdies, howlers, 
 hawkers, whistle-blowers, bell-ringers, and the rest be 
 incontinently hushed, and especially if they carry on their 
 diabolism at night. 
 
 Concerning the class of partly preventable noises of 
 cities, the greater amount of them is connected with street 
 traffic, and here arises the great need of good, smooth 
 pavements. As with the strawberry, so it is with the as- 
 phalt pavement, doubtless a better one could have been 
 or may be invented, but doubtless it never has been in-
 
 " MUSIC." 241 
 
 vented. It is incomprehensible that people should consent 
 to endure the torment arising from the stone and boulder 
 pavements, and seemingly designed, like African music, 
 for creating the most intolerable clatter possible. In addi- 
 tion to this aspect of the question, there is another reason 
 why, as physicians, we should do away with block and 
 cobblestone pavements : they are excellent culture-grounds 
 for lodging filth and disease-germs. The asphalt pave- 
 ment offers no such a nidus and can be easily flushed and 
 kept clean. 
 
 The degree and character of the civilization of a country 
 are indicated by the amount of unnecessary noise it endures, 
 and this is accurately gauged by the condition of the pave- 
 ments of its cities. 
 
 THE NOISOME NOISE OF UNMUSICAL MUSIC. 
 
 " The News is delighted with the responsive Amen ! in 
 many lay and medical journals and from personal corre- 
 spondents as regards its protest against the brutality of the 
 noise-makers. It is a pity that we should end with protest 
 only, and that legislative and police restriction cannot be 
 made effective. Let everybody appeal personally and by 
 letter to the proper administrative authorities and demand 
 that illegal noises shall be stopped, and that those that are 
 not absolutely forbidden shall be lessened. Medical socie- 
 ties should act as bodies and through committees to abate 
 these nuisances. The hours for sleep should be kept quiet 
 for the thousands of sleepers and not monopolized by the 
 half-dozen brawlers and howlers. There seems to be a 
 tacit understanding on the part of the police that anything 
 that a South-Sea Islander or an Oriental would call ' music '
 
 242 " MUSIC." 
 
 must be sacred, no matter how execrable and ear-splitting 
 the din or the bawling. The police of Philadelphia would 
 not think of stopping a crew of drunken, singing rowdies, a 
 darkey band, a French-harp fiend, an organ-grinder, or an 
 accordion monomaniac from committing his crimes against 
 health, no matter if the iniquities are carried out in what 
 should be the stillness of Sunday or of the night. The air- 
 beaters and ear-bangers have it all their own way, and if a 
 lot of well-to-do folk meet together to eat and chat, they 
 set a worthy example by having a band to scrape and blow 
 musical sounds that not a single diner listens to for a sec- 
 ond and which forces him to roar and bellow at the top of 
 his voice to make his neighbor six inches away hear a 
 spoken word. ' What you talk about is music, but what 
 you like is noise,' said a wise man to his pupil, and it is 
 true here and to-day." [Medical News, September 9, 1893.]
 
 MEDICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE INSURANCE.* 
 
 Every thoroughgoing Darwinian, Spencer chief among 
 all, is never weary of pointing out that modern civilization 
 and sentimentalism works to the survival of the unfit, thus 
 contradicting the plain trend of the ordinary laws of bio- 
 logic evolution. Devolution is in this way set against 
 evolution, and instead of progressively strengthening and 
 hardening the race, there are subtle forces sapping the 
 vitality and rendering the more luxurious or civilized 
 unfit for competition with the sturdier and biogenetically 
 more obedient races. The great growth of civilized luxury 
 is thus working to produce an ever-increasing army of 
 social parasites, who, without aim or ability, live but to 
 enjoy themselves, and make a miserable failure even of 
 that. Indiscriminate charity, say the evolutionists, compli- 
 cates the problem and exaggerates the natural supply of 
 hangers-on, while the weak, the stunted, the diseased, the 
 defectives of a thousand types, are nursed and coddled by 
 protection and kindness to propagate their like, and thus 
 handicap both the present and the future in the struggle 
 for existence that is said to underlie all genuine elevation 
 or even persistence of stock. Looked at from this stand- 
 point exclusively, it has been contended that medicine 
 itself is guilty of sustaining those in half-life, who, having 
 received their death sentence, postpone the execution, use- 
 less retainers, pensioners, and camp-followers of the much- 
 enduring, hard-pressed army of civilization. It has indeed 
 been contended that had Koch succeeded instead of failing 
 
 * From the Medical News, January 23, 1892. 
 243
 
 244 LIFE INSURANCE. 
 
 to find an effective tuberculocide, he would thereby have 
 done the world the greatest conceivable injury in licensing 
 the weak-lunged, narrow-chested, deoxygenated failures to 
 become the breeders of the coming race. 
 
 Now, however false and one-sided these views may be, 
 and false and exaggerated we believe them, it is still always 
 advisable to " heed the other opinion," know it, estimate it 
 at its proper value, and meet it with logic and valor. We 
 may shudder at the awful chasm such an unmoral and 
 brutal lifting of the clouds discloses at our feet, but if the 
 deep is there, the shudder itself renders us less steady of 
 foot, and less possessed of aplomb. Happily, the confuta- 
 tion of this view is easy. If none other existed, the fact 
 is patent that the workman's children are better breeders 
 than those of the nabob. Parasitism begets in men de- 
 bauchery and physiologic degradation ; in women, weak- 
 ness, hysteria, and general good-for-nothingness. The 
 children of the rich are " poor risks." 
 
 This, however, is but a too long preamble of a thought 
 as to life insurance and the role that it is coming to play in 
 our modern life. Is it, like luxury and vice, one of the 
 great powers reversing the law of evolution and working to 
 race deterioration ? 
 
 There can be no discussion as to the fact that hygiene, 
 sanitation, increased comfort, and medical science have 
 contributed to a lengthening of the average human life. 
 But the life-insurance rates of premium continue so high 
 that despite palatial offices, opera-bouffe salaries, and all 
 that, it becomes a puzzle to presidents and boards what to 
 do with the enormous surpluses constantly increasing. 
 
 Again, medical science has grown so shrewd that coming 
 death may be long foreseen. Doubtful risks are refused, 
 and thus the insured are those most certain-of long life. 
 Risk is thus reduced to a minimum and the surplus natu- 
 rally grows.
 
 LIFE INSURANCE. 245 
 
 The crux of the argument is reached when from the 
 foregoing premises it is logically seen that with high pre- 
 miums only the well-to-do and the long-to-live can insure. 
 The poor those on sentimental or religious grounds most 
 needing insurance cannot afford insurance, and the un- 
 healthy, or those of suspicious heredity or occupation 
 precisely those again that, from sympathetic or ethical 
 reasons, should be most and best insured cannot pass the 
 examinations. Those children of the deceased parents 
 who were rich enough and healthy enough to insure are 
 left with a competence that gives them a solid locus standi 
 on the globe, and permits them again and always to multi- 
 ply ; whilst the poor workman and the " poor risk " who 
 had neither the money nor the body to secure insurance 
 for their children, early leave them sadly and doubly handi- 
 capped in the race of life. 
 
 Such, undoubtedly, has been the influence in the past. 
 Need it, or will it be so in the future ? Proofs are begin- 
 ning to multiply that an entire change of front and of pol- 
 icy is, or is to be, undertaken. Some form of socialism is 
 " in the air," fated to come. The life of the community is 
 above that of the individual. 
 
 Already several counteracting forces are at work : 
 
 i. The shame and crime of dishonest "graveyard," 
 infant, and " get-rich-quick " insurance (or assurance) com- 
 panies cannot blind the discerning to the fact that mutual and 
 assessment companies, if properly watched and controlled, 
 can give, and do give, trustworthy insurance at one-half or 
 one-fourth the rates of the old companies. If, as need not 
 happen, the company stops to-morrow, there is no exodus 
 to Canada, and it has given value received up to date. 
 There seems no reason why a precise amount of insurance 
 should not be bought for a definite time, exactly as one 
 buys so much coffee, house rent, or a time loan. And 
 further, why should not the premium be dependent upon
 
 246 LIFE INSURANCE. 
 
 or in proportion to the medically-estimated probability ot 
 life for each case ? At present it is either sheep or goats 
 two classes alone but just as we all are a little wicked 
 and a little good, so our chances of approaching death are 
 of all degrees, and ratable in proportion. 
 
 2. Many companies are so transforming their business 
 that it is becoming that of a savings-fund or investment 
 company, the death element an excluded, minor, or incon- 
 siderable one. 
 
 3. Many companies that will not break the rule, wink at 
 or whisper to their medical examiners to use not a little 
 discretion. Albuminuria is becoming quite " physiologi- 
 cal ; " a little cardiac hypertrophy, a slight mitral murmur, 
 a defective hereditary history, etc., are ignored. The 
 printed rules stand, but the personal equation is given much 
 play. 
 
 4. Companies are forming to insure those excluded by 
 the rigid medical examiners of the billion-surplus com- 
 panies, i. e., accepting more doubtful risks, whilst yet other 
 associations are forming to insure whoever will without 
 any medical examination whatever. 
 
 5. Governmental insurance and systematic generalized 
 pensioning is either under way or preparing to hoist anchor. 
 
 These and many more considerations that might be ad- 
 duced go to prove that " the bars are being let down." It 
 is felt that, taken as a nation, our people are paying for 
 their partial and unjustly classified insurance an excessive 
 rate, and receiving therefor an insurance that discriminates 
 unjustly between the classes and the masses. Individual- 
 ism in insurance must have limits, and the common health, 
 as well as the commonwealth, has its significance, duties, 
 and demands. The tendency to socialistic legislation, the 
 generalization, the extension of the pensioning system by 
 corporations and by government, government insurance 
 itself all these and more point to the fact that the health
 
 LIFE INSURANCE. 247 
 
 and death of every member of the community is of interest 
 to every other member. Disease, if not self-interest, binds 
 us all together and makes our own well-being depend upon 
 that of every other. Preposterous as it may seem, the 
 rates of premium are higher for the healthy and rich be- 
 cause the poor and unhealthy are excluded. A strange 
 fact is coming to light: one of the richest of New York in- 
 surance companies, one that takes the most doubtful and 
 dangerous risks, has one of the lowest death rates. The 
 life companies will soon learn that popularizing, broaden- 
 ing, and generalizing, making less stringent their medical 
 examinations, will not only cheapen the premium, but 
 strengthen the company and multiply its power for good. 
 
 Thus, sooner or later, one sees the medical aspect of a 
 study, whatever it may be, comes uppermost. There 
 seems no doubt of the ability of companies to lower the 
 premium, or to lessen the rigidity of the medical examina- 
 tion, or to do both combined. As a skilled and directing 
 chief officer of these great powers of modern society, the 
 medical examiner for life insurance companies should use 
 his encouraging influence toward extending to those less 
 equipped with health or money the beneficent action of 
 the communal helping hand in time of sickness and death.
 
 FOOT-BALL* 
 
 To one who is not bereft of reason and moderation by 
 the " rush-line " of a popular craze or fad, it is simply 
 astonishing to witness the excesses permitted nay, en- 
 couraged in the name of athletics and education by the 
 foot-ball enthusiasts. 
 
 Note, first, the clear trend of the whole affair toward 
 professionalism, including betting and gambling. It is 
 simply absurd to longer shut one's eyes to this fact. 
 Pseudoeducators and wild enthusiasts may deny or seek 
 to ignore it, but it is fast becoming an open secret that men 
 are making a livelihood by the game, that sometimes their 
 expenses in college are paid for the purpose of winning 
 match-games, and that betting on the results of the matches 
 is growing more and more common. Now, a frank, out- 
 and-out professionalism in athletics is not so bad a thing, if 
 the game be truly an athletic and hygienic one, and not 
 brutalizing to mind or body. But one who to any small 
 extent is aware of the way collegiate politics are becom- 
 ing bound up with semiprofessional foot-ball politics must 
 deplore the malevolent influence of the game upon modern 
 educational tendencies. 
 
 And, in the name of education what a farce ! Can any 
 sane man deny that in founding, endowing, and encourag- 
 ing institutions of learning, the object is to fit men for the 
 intellectual battles of life ? Can he deny that the training 
 and development of the muscular system, desirable as it is 
 or may be and there is only one thing that is more desir- 
 
 *From the Medical News of November, 1893. 
 248
 
 FOOT- BALL. 249 
 
 able should be subordinated, as a feeder and supporter 
 to mental athletics? Finally, can it for a moment be 
 denied that the student who is a foot-ball enthusiast, 
 whether player or "howler," is nowadays giving a dispro- 
 portionate amount of his time and interest to the game 
 rather than to his studies? Does the collegiate "foot-ballist" 
 desire rather to stand at the head of his class, school, or 
 country, as the best-educated man, or to win the applause 
 of 20,000 spectators, and to have his hideous picture and 
 his biography spread before the readers of every daily 
 paper as one of the winning team in a match game ? 
 
 What do professors and educators mean who encourage 
 such a tendency? It is either an undignified renunciation 
 of their proper office and function in favor of the professor 
 of athletics and physical training (would it were even so 
 good a thing as that !), or it is a concession to a low type of 
 collegiate politics and to an irrational fashionable fad. 
 
 Do they not suspect that they are raising a ghost that 
 they cannot "lay" again? Wise educators are to-day 
 frightened at the influence of the foot-ball problem, and are 
 seeking earnestly to check the fatal tendency to rowdyish- 
 ness and coarseness following necessarily and closely upon 
 such practices and abuses of the game instinct. 
 
 We are well aware of the favorable statistics the 
 enthusiasts offer as to the influence of athletics on educa- 
 tion. There are two fallacies in them : i. Foot-ball is not 
 athletics, and the influence of this game will soon reduce 
 the good average as shown by and due to athletics proper. 
 2. The statistics are gathered and offered by the enthusiasts 
 of the game. 
 
 In the name of universal and of university gymnastics 
 what a farce ! Instead of carefully training each and every 
 student physiologically and systematically, so that his 
 bodily defects shall be corrected, and so that his body shall 
 be a supple, strong, and beautiful servant of the mind, there 
 
 22
 
 250 FOOT-BALL. 
 
 is a concentration of all training upon one man out of a 
 hundred, for a special and not by any means beautiful 
 purpose. Ninety-nine let one do their exercising (except- 
 ing the vocal part !) for them, and we have the noteworthy 
 result vicarious athletics, or gymnastics by proxy. Ath- 
 letics by proxy can only be compared to religion by proxy 
 the plan of some religious sects that hire a few profes- 
 sionals to do their worship for them they, the passive 
 audience, watching the performance. The aim of educators, 
 so far as it relates to athletics, should be to give every 
 student a rounded, harmonious physical organization, not 
 to train a dozen or two dozen semiprofessionals (some- 
 times wholly professional except in name), hired, bribed, 
 or wheedled to attend the institution, to be a show-team, 
 and win matches in order to attract students to the institu- 
 tion. The college that has not a splendid gymnasium, 
 large enough for every one of its students, and a compulsory 
 system of physical training for each has little just claim 
 upon parents or the public. The wise father, other things 
 being equal, will send his son to the college that has the 
 best general gymnasium and the poorest record in winning 
 public athletic games. 
 
 In the name of esthetics what a farce ! What a 
 remarkable spectacle is that of a quilted, bepadded, dis- 
 heveled, long-haired, begrimed, scarred foot-ball hero who 
 finds glory in a savage's scrimmage in the mud! A sane 
 and healthy enthusiasm and love for athletic excellence 
 must have some artistic touch to it. How would the hero 
 of the games of classic Greece at the height of that nation's 
 splendid athletic development compare with our bruised 
 and dirty hero of the foot-ball field? 
 
 In the name of hygiene, physical and mental what a 
 farce! Last week near New York a young man's neck 
 was broken on the foot-ball field. The enthusiast sneers 
 when the game is called brutal, but in sober earnest is
 
 FOOT-BALL. 251 
 
 prize fighting less brutal ? Doubtless foot-ball has killed 
 more persons than fisticuffs. The papers teem with 
 accounts of the physical injuries of the players after every 
 game. These young men are getting to be proud of their 
 injuries, their sprains, their battered faces, and wrenched 
 limbs. Is this not topsy-turvy ? Is this gymnastics ? If 
 so, it is inverted gymnastics on its head in the mud ! We 
 laugh at the outrageously perverted pride of the German 
 student who exhibits his chopped and mangled face as a 
 proof of glory instead of shame and we are going the 
 same road. Wise fathers are beginning to refuse their 
 sons permission to play a game that relies for its charm 
 upon a distinct reversion to a barbaric type of sport, in 
 which savagery, danger, and the lowest kind of physical 
 prowess are the alluring elements. 
 
 In the name of example to the young what a farce ! 
 A game must be translated into the vernacular of the 
 street-urchin to illustrate clearly its possibility for evil. 
 The beautiful games of cricket and base-ball have, on the 
 whole, been a blessing to the country ; they are not brutal 
 they have large elements of skill and intellectuality in 
 them; they encourage suppleness and all-round develop- 
 ment of the body, of the senses, and of the mind. A 
 "scrub-game" by suburban boys, or even by street gamins, 
 does not make the players worse than they naturally are, 
 does not arouse all the fierce and brutal passions of the 
 savage nature, none too easily held in control even by the 
 best. But compare this with a foot-ball game by the same 
 half-civilized or quarter-civilized little savages, and one 
 sees quickly the influence for evil of apparently so simple 
 and small a thing as a game. If, governed by rigid rules 
 and umpires, the presence of a vast, refined audience, and 
 the possession by the players of good home-training, 
 education, and all that, the game results in charges and the 
 facts of " slugging," and in passionate enmities and rivalries,
 
 252 FOOT-BALL. 
 
 what then is to be expected from its translation into the 
 conditions of the alley, the vacant lot of the city outskirts, 
 and " played " by the most unregenerate types of human 
 nature? Imitation is flattery usually but in this instance 
 the flattery is nauseating even to the flattered. 
 
 It is a cause of deep regret that we should approach the 
 ideal of Rome in our national sports, rather than that of 
 Greece, and it is especially significant when educators and 
 universities show this tendency. One would not expect 
 them to encourage gladiatorial rather than intellectual and 
 truly athletic contests. 
 
 Have we not more patriotism and originality than to 
 accept this worn-out, brutal old game second-hand from 
 England? Have we not enough intellect to put some true 
 " play," some ingenuity, and spontaneity into our national 
 sport? Have we not enough mind to introduce something 
 into play except " a secret code of signs," " undergraduate 
 rules," and a coarse scrimmage of a dozen bleeding, 
 bunched, and scuffling fellows sprawling in the mud? 
 
 If not in the name of general education, then in the 
 name of medical education ; if not in the name of moral- 
 ity, then in the name of medicine; if not in the name of 
 esthetics, then in the name of physiology; if not in the 
 name of social progress, then in the name of hygienic 
 progress it is time that we should command, Halt! The 
 game is un-American and absolutely opposed to the spirit 
 of true education, whether of the mind or of the body. 
 
 PROMISED FOOT-BALL REFORM.* 
 
 To one who can read between the lines, the actions and 
 arguments of the foot-ball advocates are furnishing a con- 
 
 * From the Medical News, January 13, 1894.
 
 FOOT-BALL. 253 
 
 stant source of excellent amusement. They are bound to 
 take note of the arguments, moral, educational, and physi- 
 ologic, against the game as it has existed, but more espe- 
 cially are they forced to consider the profound wave of 
 popular indignation rising against past excesses. Instead 
 of a means of attraction of students it is quite possible 
 that the game may cause subtraction. In this dilemma a 
 way out has been found by reluctant acceptance and forced 
 advocacy of reform. Reform is promised, but the funny 
 part comes in when we note the ill-concealed disgust at the 
 nauseous dose. However, the critics of foot-ball excess 
 may rest satisfied with their work, if reform of the rules be 
 really brought about, and if it be such as to do away with 
 the evils of the game. This will be the critics' work, and 
 this is all they have wished. " Reform within the party " 
 was not tried spontaneously, and has only been promised 
 by force of compulsion, criticism, and popular feeling from 
 without. The critics may also point out that the specious- 
 ness of the logic so far offered in defense is apparent in the 
 fact that every line of the argument could be applied in 
 favor of boxing. Indeed, in the late magazine defenses of 
 the game every time the word foot-ball occurs it could be 
 replaced by the word glove-fighting with equal and even 
 with sounder logic. The difference of acceptance of the 
 logic consists solely in the fact that foot-ball is the fashion- 
 able fad of the day and prize-fighting is not. There will 
 never fail able, at least plenteous, defenses of the customs 
 and demands of the Zeitgeist. Every English Bishop, the 
 powers, votes, and logic of the Established Church (by 
 name, of Christ, and of Religion) arrayed themselves against 
 the abolition of slavery all of which does not affect the 
 fact that slavery was wrong, unchristian, and irreligious. 
 To flatter the Zeitgeist and " the powers that be " is pleasing 
 to that fickle and faithless tyrant, and, temporarily, very, 
 very profitable to the flatterer. But, again, flattery, ap-
 
 254 FOOT-BALL. 
 
 plause, profit, and honor cannot alter the facts that, as car- 
 ried on of late, foot-ball has not been in the interests of 
 true athletics or genuine physiologic culture, and has been 
 very far from furthering the clear purposes of education 
 and of educational institutions. Hence when the advocates 
 of the game (however grudgingly and slurringly) acknowl- 
 edge the past abuses, and promise such reform as will do 
 away with these abuses, we warmly cry them welcome, and 
 beg pardon for any" excess of zeal " on our part. We are 
 all, it seems, in favor, and most heartily, too, of the best and 
 most perfect development of the human body ; but we pro- 
 test that this must be consistent with, nay, subordinated to, 
 the best and most perfect development of the human mind.
 
 MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT AND USE THE 
 CONDITIONS OF HEALTH.* 
 
 It was, we believe, a saying of Pascal that the evils that 
 afflict mankind arise from an inability to sit still in a room 
 meaning thereby that in useless and ill-considered action 
 is to be found the origin of much tribulation, and that 
 calmly thinking out the best methods of action in advance 
 would obviate it. But the modern physician and hygienist 
 must often feel like reversing Pascal's mot, and saying that 
 the evils that afflict mankind or more truly womankind 
 (the same thing, however !) come mainly from sitting still 
 in a room. We mean by this that the great and the 
 increasing prevalence of sedentary and indoor occupations 
 inflicted on human bodies is already ripening a wretched 
 source of physical (and hence psychic and moral) suffering. 
 If there is any truth at all in evolution it is that animal and 
 human life and progress have always been conditioned 
 upon the exercise of the muscular system, that function 
 precedes and begets structure, and that disuse leads to 
 atrophy and death. 
 
 The disuse of the muscular system that is a result of 
 civilization is the prolific source of much of the disease of 
 modern life and an illustration of the biologic law. All the 
 discoveries of modern medicine and science, every bacteri- 
 ologic truth, every known etiology of disease, simply con- 
 firms the truth that, together with cleanliness, muscular 
 health and development are the necessary conditions of 
 freedom from disease, and that there is no health of the 
 muscles without use of the muscles. The bacillus of 
 
 * From the Medical News, November 1 8, 1893. 
 255
 
 256 MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH. 
 
 tuberculosis has no power of harm to a person with proper 
 thoracic and pulmonary expansion and development. All 
 " consumption cures " except this one are useless, and this 
 with some exceptions is effective in prophylaxis or cure. 
 There is hardly a disease that does not equally well illus- 
 trate this truth. 
 
 What is civilization doing with this law ? It is crowding 
 people into huge cities, where every means of artificial 
 locomotion, every labor-saving apparatus, and every neces- 
 sity of business are all working to the same end of inactive 
 muscles. From the weak, half-atrophied muscles naturally 
 follow the defective digestion and assimilation of food, and 
 the over-wrought hyperesthetic morbid nervous system, 
 ever vainly seeking to undo and to right the evils of 
 denutrition, hypernutrition, and muscular inactivity. Our 
 food is premasticated and we are becoming edentulous, 
 and from the advertisements of predigested foods it would 
 appear that we shall soon have no need of a private stom- 
 ach, liver, or pancreas, because we can and should buy 
 these products from the slaughter-house and laboratory, 
 and thus save personal wear and tear. It is in the line of 
 the much expounded physiologic division of labor. But 
 that line logically and inevitably ends in the condition of 
 some slave-holding ants that cannot move, and unless fed 
 by their slaves die of starvation even when food is before 
 them. Of course, we already have analogues of these 
 little organisms in the increasing horde of urban hysterics, 
 neurasthenics, roues, and tramps of various sorts, both 
 aristocratic and ragged. 
 
 And lastly, comes the sham-science that would supply 
 the want of healthy vital powers of all kinds, cerebral, 
 muscular, testicular, and what-not, burned out by abuse or 
 atrophied by disuse, by means of squirting into the veins 
 or under the skin some of the supposed vital, but really 
 dead and inert, juices of animals.
 
 MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT AND HEALTH. 257 
 
 And even our frantic attempts to remedy the evil of 
 muscular inactivity, with its spawn of varied disease, are 
 themselves morbid, and sometimes serve to increase the 
 evil. This fact becomes plain in our rage for athletics by 
 proxy, and in the steady trend of athletic games toward 
 professionalism and newspaper notoriety, sensationalism, 
 to the encouragement of betting, and to the more brutal 
 sorts of arena combats. 
 
 So far as cities are concerned, one of the most crying of 
 evils is over-pressure of school-children. Every physician 
 has daily before his eyes the sad results, and he knows 
 that instead of medicine the poor little body needs play and 
 exercise, and out-of-door air and sunshine. All of the 
 book-cramming that can be jammed into them will never 
 compensate for the pallor, the pipe-stem legs, the narrow 
 chests, and the stunted or abnormal growth. 
 
 The city child needs what it cannot have, country life. 
 Failing in this it should be supplied with abundant, health- 
 ful gymnasium exercise, under the careful eye of expert 
 and discriminating teachers of hygiene and physiologic de- 
 velopment. 
 
 All of this is doubly true as regards girls and women. 
 Fashion and house-incarceration and wealth are reducing 
 our women to sad specimens of bodily and muscular ill- 
 health, flabbiness, and undevelopment. Either publicly, 
 or in private to parents, every physician can point out the 
 truth, and by his advice may help to avert the crop of 
 coming disease or, in some degree, to cure the pathetic 
 instances that fall under his care.
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY.* 
 
 Perhaps you feel surprised and doubtful as to the exist- 
 ence of any medical duty you may owe, either to your- 
 selves or to your fellows. You probably are inwardly say- 
 ing that you know nothing about medicine, and that you 
 employ a physician to attend to medical matters. 
 
 My purpose to-night is to impress upon you the truth 
 that each one of you has many and very important medi- 
 cal duties, and that you must no longer shirk them, because 
 these duties are most imperative and vital to the lives of 
 each and every one. The medical profession is struggling 
 under the Atlantean world of deputed responsibility you 
 have thrust upon its shoulders, but the labor is hard and 
 the result less successful because of your persistence in 
 vicariously ridding yourselves of the duty. In politics, all 
 good citizens are convinced that leaving Government and 
 Legislation to professional politicians and bosses is highly 
 immoral and ineffective it is political crime and leads to 
 the death of patriotism. So in medicine you must not turn 
 your own work unquestioningly over to the medical bosses, 
 but must see to a large part of it yourselves; you must at 
 least strengthen the power of those who are able to be 
 trusted with medical office-holding, and must destroy the 
 power of the corrupt bosses. In other words, you must 
 personally attend the primaries. 
 
 Our medical duties, like any duties, do not refer alone to 
 ourselves or to our families. The public health is your 
 
 * An Address delivered before the Unitarian Club of Philadelphia, February 
 II, 1892. 
 
 258
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 259 
 
 health. The community is a vast family, and the possibil- 
 ity of disease and death unites us in one common bond of 
 self-interest. If each of us did our duty in the prevention 
 of disease, the average life would be lengthened, life-insur- 
 ance premiums would be less by a half, and the friction, sin, 
 sorrow, and vice of life immeasurably reduced. 
 
 One of our medical duties of which you are most shame- 
 fully neglectful is lack of helpful sympathy with the medi- 
 cal profession. Here is a body of men, the like of which 
 in devotion and self-sacrifice to the interests of society has 
 hardly ever been seen. Assuredly nothing like the specta- 
 cle exists to-day in any other equally large class of men. 
 In a recent novel Robert Louis Stevenson says : " There 
 are men who stand above the common herd, the soldier, the 
 sailor, and the shepherd unfrequently ; the artist rarely ; 
 rarer still the clergyman ; the physician almost as a rule." 
 In Philadelphia there are besides the private cases annually 
 treated by physicians, about half a million public cases of 
 disease among the poor (and many that are not poor, alas !) 
 for absolutely nothing. Every hospital of the land is 
 carried on by the unpaid labor of physicians. Are there 
 twenty-five ; is there one great institution, or one ever so 
 little institution, where poor folks can go and get legal 
 advice, counsel, and help, gratis ? Do your tailors furnish 
 people with clothes for nothing ? If you get married or 
 die, your mininster is paid, and rightly so, for his labor. 
 Far more than this, scientific medical men are working, not 
 only to cure, but with undaunted, tireless zeal, to prevent 
 disease. Whilst almost all the rich are forming plots, 
 " combines," and " trusts " to increase their share of the 
 commonwealth, and to magnify their power, whilst the 
 tradesmen and mechanics and laborers of every kind are 
 forming unions and trade-guilds to protect themselves, the 
 medical profession not only forms no union, no self-protect- 
 ing guild, but is laboring heroically to render itself useless
 
 260 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 and occupationless. Now, despite this splendid unsel- 
 fishness and zeal for your welfare, how do you treat 
 the profession ? You cultivate and support quackery, 
 which is one of the curses of civilization, and which in in- 
 juring the profession slightly, does the community infinitely 
 more harm. The newspapers are filled with quack adver- 
 tisers, bent only on getting money, without medical knowl- 
 edge, caring nothing, knowing nothing, about curing. 
 You support all this, because you allow servants, family, or 
 friends to patronize these wretches. Sectarianism in medi- 
 cine, a moral and medical sin, is finally your work. Not 
 only this, but of the regular medical profession you too 
 often prefer the quack in the profession to the better man. 
 If you see in the daily papers an account, a " reading 
 notice," of some miraculous operation performed by some 
 sneaking advertiser in the profession, or some pompous 
 nonsense about professional matters, you think this must be 
 a very smart man, and when ill, you will go to him. You 
 do not think that physicians who do these things have 
 directly or indirectly been in collusion with the newspaper 
 reporter, that they are advertisers and quacks, whose pro- 
 fessional opinion is scientifically valueless. 
 
 Moreover, whenever, to protect you from their scoun- 
 drelism, the medical profession tries to get laws passed 
 against charlatans, laws to stop their knaveries, laws to 
 elevate the medical profession and keep out of it the ill- 
 educated and the unfitted, you do not help us, but allow 
 the interested and combined hordes of quacks to so 
 intimidate your legislators that they fear to vote for de- 
 cency. 
 
 Lastly, you allow the patent-medicine outrage to flourish, 
 to control legislation, to poison your bodies and pollute 
 your health, and befoul every newspaper, barn, house, fence, 
 and field with beastly advertisements. 
 
 Some day the darling child of your own life sickens and
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 261 
 
 dies, or recovers to become a physical weakling and 
 sufferer. If you ever come to realize that this was because 
 you did not guard against tuberculous or otherwise diseased 
 milk and meat, you then realize that you have shirked a 
 medical duty or, if you please, a medical self-interest, 
 because self-interest and duty are often synonymous. If 
 you find the poison of subtle disease striking down yourself 
 or friends, you again may come to know of a medical duty 
 you have forgotten of preventing typhoid fever or other 
 contagious disease by proper drainage and sanitary meas- 
 ures. A hundred such illustrations readily occur to you, 
 now that you think of the question. 
 
 It is a strange fact that people cleanly in some things are 
 filthy in others. The medical motive may come in play 
 when the motive of cleanliness has been wholly forgotten. 
 Hence it is that some people who seem to care nothing for 
 certain kinds of filthiness, may come to care for the possible 
 disease that often accompanies the filth. For example, I 
 never go on the street that I am not nauseated and shocked 
 to see some well-dressed, or rather expensively and poorly- 
 dressed, woman sweeping the trail of her dress through pol- 
 lution and indescribable street-deposits. She does not seem 
 to care for the nastiness of it, but if she could realize that she 
 may be bringing home with her some of the most horrible and 
 deadly germs of disease, to be dried and scattered over her 
 home, to be breathed by her family, and perhaps to fatally 
 poison bodily life if she knew this as physicians know it, 
 she would certainly not do it. One other little example : 
 On coming to Philadelphia, my wife and I were maddened 
 every market-day by being forced to buy and have brought 
 home fowls long dead, but with the intestinal filth still 
 polluting the flesh. Bacteriologists know what a breeding- 
 ground of pathogenic bacteria and toxic ptomains and 
 leucomains the digestive organs of an animal are. Why 
 in the name of decency you will allow your market-men
 
 262 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 to so humbug and doubly cheat you, I cannot understand. 
 Demand that your poultry be " drawn " before buying it. 
 
 You see I am dead in earnest, and propose being as 
 intensely practical. There is no use in mincing words. 
 
 I would like to curse and ridicule the corset, but it's no 
 use. Why women will do so, is beyond the reason of man. 
 It is hideous and deadly. Every man whom they think 
 they are pleasing by crushing lungs, liver, and pelvic 
 organs, is in reality disgusted by the wasp -waist. With- 
 out it the medical profession would soon find itself much 
 out of work, yet, how we do hate it! 
 
 And so I could wander on with a thousand illustrations. 
 Every article of dress, almost every article of food bought, 
 the water you drink, has a medical significance. The way 
 food is cooked and the way it is eaten, certainly have. The 
 way you sit in reading, and how you hold your book, may 
 mean years of ocular suffering and pain. Out of the 
 myriad of things I could and would like to scold about, let 
 me choose more specifically two or three and go a little 
 into details. 
 
 Take the milk brought to your breakfast table. You 
 may never have thought of this, but there are a hundred 
 medical problems involved in the milk-supply. In not 
 one of these vitally important problems have you taken as 
 much of an interest as you have in two trivial and silly 
 things. You have been worried and angered by the milk- 
 man's knavery in watering his milk, but if he used pure 
 water, it was a small affair compared to other things. 
 You should have seen to many things before the pump- 
 handle. The second source of your vexation has doubtless 
 been the price of the milk. You have been unwilling to 
 pay ten cents a quart, when a little consideration would 
 have shown you that the best pure milk from rightly-bred 
 and properly-fed and well-cared-for cows cannot be deliv- 
 ered to you for less than fifteen or twenty cents a quart.
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 263 
 
 You have forced your dairyman to be slovenly, to give 
 you dirty, diseased, and diluted milk. Having done so, 
 you turn about and abuse him for what you have demanded 
 and commanded. To start and reform in this matter, 25 to 
 50 families might join together and agree to give some 
 farmer 15 or 20 cents for milk supplied under proper con- 
 ditions. In Baltimore a sanitary milk company with a capi- 
 tal of $100,000 has been formed, rigid inspection of the 
 herds as to health, stabling, milking, and handling the milk 
 being the objects aimed at. The herd must not be of the 
 often tuberculous and diseased monstrosity, the Jersey, or 
 other highly-bred cows, but the average animal of fair breed- 
 ing. Many safeguards, all expensive, as to water, food, 
 stabling, must be observed. The milk is not healthy at cer- 
 tain seasons of the cow's life. The animal must be bedded, 
 curried, kept clean with as much scrupulousness as if she 
 were a blooded race-horse. The cows that now secrete your 
 milk, live, lie in, and all their lives are covered with filth. 
 The milker is dirty, often infectiously diseased, and the milk- 
 ing often dirty. Persons recovering from scarlet fever, in 
 milking a cow have been known to infect the milk and thus 
 give the disease to persons using milk. The milk-vessels 
 often have not been scalded. The milk should be brought 
 to you, if possible, in an hour or two after the milking, 
 having been quickly cooled, and kept at a low temperature, 
 in sweet, hermetically sealed glass vessels, these immedi- 
 ately emptied, and immediately boiled, dried, and again 
 scalded until refilled. The diseased, old, and impure milk 
 you are now using should be sterilized, and you should 
 look in some day at the cellars and back rooms of your 
 milkman when he isn't expecting you, and see how the 
 vessels are cleaned, or not cleaned, and what fine chances 
 you have to give your babies tubercle-bacilli and poison 
 them with the impurities of the simplest and most neces- 
 sary of all foods. A thimbleful of Boston milk contains
 
 *6 4 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 on the average 2,335,500 bacteria, the Charleston samples 
 over four million, the North-end only three-quarters of a 
 million. These samples were taken directly from the 
 wagons. But the average number of bacteria in grocery 
 samples (when the milk stood longer and was dirty) was 
 4,557,000 per cubic centimeter. The lowest number in 
 any sample was 30,600. In Halle, Germany, as many as 
 30,000,000 have been found. The average of American 
 cities is estimated to be at least one million. For nursing 
 infants requiring cow's milk, there are a great many special 
 precautions and rules to follow to avoid disease. 
 
 But you will object that you have no time to attend to 
 all these matters, and quickly will come the answering 
 question, " Why don't you hire and commission some one 
 to do it ? " " Oh ! but we have a Board of Health to 
 attend to that." " Have you, indeed ? And you don't pay 
 its members a cent. Would you give your life to attend- 
 ing to drains, and cess-pools, and diseased milk, and bad 
 meat, and preventing infectious diseases, and all that, for 
 nothing, absolutely nothing?" Take milk again; the 
 only genuine reform will consist in systematic, scientific 
 examination and ordering of the dairy farms and herds by 
 public officers, well-paid and intellectually equipped. 
 Typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and 
 perhaps other diseases, may be and are brought to your 
 homes in milk. The evil must be attacked at its source. 
 If the President of the Board of Health should go before 
 Councils and ask for an appropriation for properly inspect- 
 ing and regulating dairy farms, would he get it ? You 
 should not sleep to-night until you write your Councilmen 
 urging them to make such an appropriation and many 
 others also. Time and time again Councilmen were asked, 
 by the Philadelphia Board of Health, for appropriations 
 for city milk inspectors. There were ten or twenty millions 
 of dollars for a marble palace for city officers, but not ten
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 265 
 
 dollars to protect the lives and health of the people. After 
 a dozen years of struggle against the milkmen, their 
 attorneys and friends, a wee-bit of an appropriation and a 
 half-starved department with insufficient funds have been 
 secured. The work cannot be half done, but already your 
 milk is far better in quality, and there is somewhat less 
 danger of deadly disease being in it. But ten or fifteen 
 men are needed instead of five, and you should urge your 
 Councilmen to provide them. If you estimate a human 
 life at its average value according to average life-length 
 and average wages, the community would save millions by 
 appropriating money liberally for inspection of dairy farms, 
 milk, etc. 
 
 The same lesson is taught by the need of meat inspec- 
 tion. Cattle with tuberculosis and actinomycosis are killed 
 in this city and you are possibly eating the meat. Up to 
 now, you, Mr. and Mrs. Public, would not vote a cent for 
 stopping this. In Berlin they have nearly 300 men con- 
 stantly employed to examine all meat offered for sale and 
 pronounce upon its healthiness. In democratic Philadel- 
 phia, up to a few weeks ago, you had not one man. I 
 learn that from January ist, appropriation has been made 
 for three inspectors. At least 25 are needed, so large is 
 the city, in order to adequately do the work. 
 
 To show you how great is the need, let me tell you that 
 within a month or two a few men, unpaid, and moved only 
 by the public good, have with little search arrested 25 
 butchers for selling diseased meat and bound them over in 
 $800 bail for future trial. A frightfully aggravating fact 
 about this question is that cattle shipped here for export to 
 other countries are examined by the U. S. Government 
 Inspectors, who condemn the diseased cattle, and will not 
 permit their shipment. These diseased cattle, however, it 
 seems, are quite good enough for you, so they are killed 
 and you buy the meat that you are ashamed to ship abroad. 
 23
 
 266 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 Was ever anything more opera-bouffe and disgusting at 
 once? If you should ask why, as in the case of milk we 
 must go to the dairy-farm, we do not again go to ihefons 
 ef origo mali, and at the West stop the shipment of diseased 
 cattle altogether, the answer is quick and sharp : Because 
 you and your servant-masters, your legislators, have failed 
 in your medical duty. Politicians have no time to attend 
 to the welfare of the public business ; they have enough to 
 do to attend to their own vulgarly called, " feathering 
 their own nest." The live-stock commissioners of Illinois 
 have tried to prevent the sale of diseased cattle in the Chi- 
 cago market, but immediately a billion-dollar Whisky 
 Trust, with its billion distillery-slop-fed cattle, opposes, 
 fights the commissioners in court, and beats them. The 
 people must eat diseased meat or the Whisky Ring will not 
 make so much money. 
 
 Frankly, one begins to wonder if democracy is the best 
 form of government after all. 
 
 As to disinfection, you allow for a city of a million of 
 inhabitants only enough money to pay the small salary of 
 one man. But every additional agent you would add, say 
 up to a dozen, would save you money in physicians' fees 
 and undertakers' bills, and would save ten or a hundred 
 times the salaries in lost time, lost health, and lost life. 
 
 No ward wants the Municipal Hospital for infectious 
 diseases within its limits, and so there is a tendency to 
 starve it out, and it is even advised to shut it up. In time 
 of peace, I mean when no epidemic disease is raging, 
 it has a limited but still very necessary usefulness, but let 
 war break out, let an epidemic of small-pox or cholera 
 come, and without the municipal hospital the calamity 
 would be appalling. What kind of a general is he that 
 dismantles his harbor-forts in time of peace? 
 
 The allusion to small-pox brings to mind the fact that 
 during the last ten years (1880-1890) there have been in
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 267 
 
 Philadelphia 1950 deaths due to this wholly preventable 
 disease. When a railway watchman by carelessness causes 
 a collision, and a dozen persons are killed, you are justly 
 horrified, but when 1950 people are killed by your careless- 
 ness, you are not at all concerned about it. Have you 
 been vaccinated or revaccinated within the last six years ? 
 Are you seeing to it that every member of your family, 
 your servants and friends, are revaccinated every few 
 years ? If you are not, do not blame the brakeman. 
 
 You perhaps think measles a slight ailment, that is not 
 very dangerous, but 957 deaths from it are chronicled in 
 this city in the past ten years. A large proportion of these 
 deaths were needless, and could have been obviated by 
 proper precautions. 
 
 Scarlet fever you know as a more serious disease, but 
 you may be surprised to learn that it has caused 3713 
 deaths in ten years. 
 
 What will you say, then, to the more frightful fact that 
 in the same time there have been 6583 deaths due to diph- 
 theria ? 
 
 The sad thing about the majority of all these deaths is 
 that they need not have been. They were so much life 
 wasted by carelessness. These are typical examples of in- 
 fectious or contagious diseases, diseases the germs of 
 which are carried in some careless, negligent way from one 
 sick person to another well person. Proper foresight and 
 care would have prevented very many, if not most, of these 
 cases of sickness and death. When such diseases appear 
 in your family, you must at once isolate the patient, i. e., 
 prevent visits to the house, keep your children from school, 
 and the entire family from visiting. You should not even 
 use library books, as these carry to the next borrower the 
 germs of the disease. Everything coming from the sick- 
 room must be disinfected, and after the illness is past, the
 
 268 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 whole room and contents must be disinfected according to 
 the orders of the physician or of the Board of Health. 
 
 Typhoid fever, of which in Philadelphia 6607 in ten 
 years have died, is often communicated by polluted water, 
 and yet we are drinking water into which the sewage of 
 several hundred thousand people has been drained. The 
 wonder is that we have so little typhoid fever and other 
 zymotic diseases. 
 
 It is better to resort to an adequate source of water 
 where the population is sparse and likely to remain so, 
 than to spend vast sums of money in removing impurities 
 by filtration, etc. The tendency is for the water to become 
 more and more impure as the population increases. Sub- 
 siding reservoirs and filtration-works are a present neces- 
 sity, but they should be so constructed as to be utilized 
 when the source of supply is changed. 
 
 All filth should be removed as promptly as possible be- 
 yond the city limits without becoming a nuisance at the 
 place of disposal. Sewers should be reconstructed in ac- 
 cordance with modern engineering practice. They should 
 be self-cleansing and not depositories of filth. The Schuyl- 
 kill below the dam, lying between two populated parts of 
 the city, is the receptacle of a vast amount of sewage. For 
 hours each day the sewage is held back by the tide, caus- 
 ing deposits in the bed of the river and foulness of the 
 stream. At the receding tide, deposits take place on the 
 low shores in the lower parts of the city, causing unhealthy 
 effluvia. To remedy this and keep the river pure, all sew- 
 age now entering the Schuylkill should be carried below 
 the city and discharged only at the ebb of the tide. Great 
 sums of money under skilled scientific guidance should be 
 spent in constructing intercepting sewers. While we are 
 thus breeding the germs of disease with our wasted sew- 
 age, the land is being exhausted of phosphatic salts and
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 269 
 
 ammonia, the very element that we throw away with sew- 
 age. The nonutilization of sewage is both a financial sin 
 and a moral sin. Bacteria, which the Bible calls " the 
 armies of the living God," are produced by the unutilized 
 sewage. When we do wrong, God has a multitude of 
 ways of punishing us, and among these the beneficent 
 microorganism is most powerful and patent. 
 
 The cremation of garbage is a much- needed sanitary re- 
 form. The present system causes great nuisances by im- 
 proper disposal, and by collecting swine within the city 
 limits. 
 
 Intramural interment is practiced to a large extent. It 
 should be prohibited in built-up parts of the city, and after 
 a number of years an opportunity should be offered to 
 remove the bodies, and the burial grounds should be 
 turned into parks. 
 
 An important sanitary reform is the establishment of 
 mortuaries throughout the city for the benefit of the poor 
 and others. The poor keep the bodies of deceased rela- 
 tives in their crowded apartments in the midst of the living. 
 Bodies could be taken to the mortuaries to await the fu- 
 neral service, and friends could assemble there, dispersing 
 after the ceremony, and thus save the expense of the fu- 
 neral procession as well as relieve the home of serious dis- 
 advantages. 
 
 People should be instructed in the management of 
 infants, especially during the hot season, and such instruc- 
 tion would be the means of reducing infant mortality. 
 Such institutions as the Children's Country-week and the 
 Sanitarium, are of great aid in this direction. More than 
 125,000 children and care-takers visited the Sanitarium in 
 the summer of 1891. A great amount of sickness, suffer- 
 ing, and death were doubtless prevented by this means, 
 and it is worthy of most liberal support. 
 
 A smooth, impervious, noiseless pavement is greatly
 
 270 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 needed. Its advantages would be cleanliness of surface 
 and soil, comfort in riding, and especially riddance of the 
 noise-nuisance so wearing on the nerves of most people, 
 and that beyond question is lessening the average duration 
 of life. 
 
 We have now thousands of acres of parks, miles away 
 from the crowded city, parks for the rich, or that the poor 
 can only use a few days of the year. What is sadly needed 
 is many small parks scattered all through the denser parts 
 of the city, little parks for the daily use of children, and so 
 near the houses of the poor that they can be reached in a 
 few minutes. 
 
 Rapid transit should be urged as an important sanitary 
 measure. Tired workmen and women and children are 
 obliged every day to stand in crowded cars while breathing 
 lifeless and even fetid air. Disease is constantly being 
 propagated under these conditions. 
 
 Everybody should protest against the common, disgust- 
 ing, and unnecessary habit of spitting in public places, 
 public vehicles, rooms, etc. It is now indubitably estab- 
 lished that the sputum of consumptives is a great means of 
 conveying the bacilli to others ; soon dried, the dust is 
 carried by the wind or by the dress-trail to lungs that are 
 the breeding-ground it seeks. 
 
 Public bath-houses for " the great unwashed " are 
 urgently needed. Not only bathing pools for use in the 
 summer time, but especially public bathing establishments, 
 where the year round the poor can bathe for a small sum. 
 I do not understand why some moderately rich man does 
 not immortalize himself, and justly, nobly so, by construct- 
 ing people's baths after the models so successful in New 
 York. 
 
 There should be established, also, public wash-houses, 
 where for a moderate sum the poor can take their clothes 
 and cleanse them by their own labor and with the aid of
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 271 
 
 labor-saving appliances. It encourages cleanliness, relieves 
 the family of the disadvantages under which they labor in 
 their crowded houses, etc. 
 
 I have left, for the sake of emphasis, the consideration of 
 tuberculosis or consumption. Fix it in your memories 
 that in Philadelphia, in ten years, 27,142 people have died 
 of this disease. There are many ways in which the tough 
 and prolific germs of this most deadly of all diseases are 
 conveyed from one person to another. There can be little 
 doubt that the milk from tuberculous cows, or by its con- 
 tamination in handling, is often the means of the transfer. 
 I have emphasized the milk-danger enough. The meat 
 from tuberculous animals may also bring the contagion. 
 Hence the urgent necessity of the thorough cooking of all 
 meat. However fashionable it may be to eat under-done 
 meat, do not you be thus fashionable. There seems to be 
 little danger of the transfer of the bacillus from the phthisi- 
 cal patient to another person except by means of the 
 sputum. This should never be allowed to dry. It should 
 at once be disinfected or burned. 
 
 But the preparation of the soil is quite as important as 
 the planting of the seed. There are probably thousands 
 of the bacilli of consumption in the lungs and digestive 
 tracts of each of us this minute. We are breathing and 
 eating them every day. But they germinate, grow, or 
 live only in certain soils ; they develop only in the lungs 
 and organs of certain persons. Just why this is so, is a 
 little hard to explain, but beyond question, besides heredi- 
 tary tendency thereto, it is in great part due to undeveloped 
 lungs, insufficient chest-exercise and development, inade- 
 quate oxygenization of the blood. We cramp our lungs 
 with tight clothes, sit too much, live too much indoors, and 
 all that. 
 
 Almost all wild animals die of consumption in captivity, 
 but never die of the disease in their native habitat. We
 
 272 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 are all wild animals in captivity to civilization. According 
 to the researches of Cornet, almost fifty per cent, of all 
 deaths in prisons are due to tuberculous disease. Outside 
 of prisons only about ten per cent, die of this disease. 
 The inference is obvious. A famous old physician never 
 failed to cure his consumptive patients if he could get them 
 to take his medicine twenty-five miles of horse-back 
 riding every day. Consumptives get well when sent to 
 high altitudes or to mild climates, where they live in the 
 open air and where respiration with chest-expansion and 
 exercise is inevitable. The lesson is clear : dress and train 
 the young in more natural ways of breathing and living; 
 let there be less schooling, less study, and less reading, 
 more light gymnastics, more open-air life, and more healthy 
 animality. 
 
 I have hardly time even to mention the evils that are 
 due to ill-ventilation of houses, of sleeping-rooms, and 
 especially of the theaters and public halls. I cannot touch 
 the evils connected with street-cleaning or noncleaning. 
 I wish I might also pitch into the shame of the adultera- 
 tion of medicines a large proportion of the drugs of the 
 ordinary drug-store being impure. I am also prevented 
 from discussing the harmful effects on health and life of 
 certain handicrafts, methods of work, etc. ; the subtle and 
 injurious effects of certain trade monopolies, trusts, and 
 " combines," in raising the price of many necessaries of 
 the poor, e. g., of McKinleyed wool, which means shoddy 
 wool, cotton instead of woolen clothing, which means dis- 
 ease and increased death-rate. Failure in school hygiene 
 is accountable for much ill-health in after-life ; the selling 
 of spectacles by opticians without medical advice and pre- 
 scription, a thing that should be forbidden by law, is 
 doing vast injury to the community. And, finally, more 
 important than any of these things, I regret being forced 
 to omit discussion of the blood-curdling horror of drink,
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 273 
 
 dealing death everywhere, corrupting the bodies, brains, 
 and souls of men, shortening and hardening the lives of us 
 all, whether drinkers or not. 
 
 The death-rate is the registering index of the whole 
 matter, though figures of this kind have to be used with 
 intelligence and judgment in order not to tell lies. In New 
 York three persons more per thousand die every year than 
 just over the river in Brooklyn. Other things being equal, 
 the greater the crowding, the greater the death-rate. 
 Bearing this in mind, weigh well the fact that with all the 
 frightful misery and crowding and squalor to be found in 
 London, a city of five million inhabitants, its death-rate is 
 nevertheless about four per thousand less than that of New 
 York. This means that if London had the same mortality 
 as New York, 20,000 more people would die each year than 
 do die. 
 
 When we come to Philadelphia, we at once find the 
 excellent results due to the fact that ours is a city of homes ; 
 the crowd-diseases are lessened, and our death-rate is four 
 per thousand less than that of New York. If our mortal- 
 ity were the same rate as that of New York, 4000 more of 
 our citizens would die each year. Our elation, however, 
 gets a sharp check when we think of what should be, and 
 compare our unnecessarily high mortality with London's 
 splendid record. With five millions of inhabitants, instead 
 of our one million, and despite all the unsanitary disad- 
 vantages, London, by heroic sanitary diligence, has brought 
 her death-rate below ours. It is no exaggeration to say 
 that instead of our death-rate being 20.66, it need not, in 
 the present state of medical and sanitary science, be over 
 17. This put in plain words means that by our culpable, 
 nay, criminal, neglect we are killing, needlessly killing, 
 something like three thousand inhabitants of our city each 
 year. 
 
 Let us estimate the financial value of this loss. The 
 24
 
 274 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 average rate of American wage-earners is about one dollar 
 a day. This is a low estimate. That is, you can buy the 
 labor of the average American citizen for about $300 a 
 year. According to insurance life-tables, the average 
 length of our life is about forty years. Our working or 
 productive period is about half that time, and the average 
 market value of one of us is therefore twenty times 300, or 
 about $6000. Put up for sale, one of us is worth $6000 
 in the labor market. Now let us allow of the 3000 killed 
 by our own carelessness and neglect, one-third of the 
 number as having passed the laboring age, and therefore 
 to be thrown out of this accounting. The remaining 2000 
 Philadelphians sacrificed to short-sightedness are thus seen 
 to be worth in the labor market $12,000,000. 
 
 But this is by no means all the loss ; for every death, Dr. 
 Farr estimates that two persons are on an average continu- 
 ously ill, i. e., there are two years of sickness for every 
 annual death. With the 3000 needless deaths, therefore, 
 there are also in Philadelphia each year the equivalent 
 of 6000 years of needless illness. Estimated in money 
 values, this means in lost time alone $1,800,000, besides the 
 doctor and druggist bills, etc. 
 
 And yet, when the city fathers are asked for a few 
 thousand dollars for meat-inspectors and milk-inspectors, for 
 new and necessary sewers, for an unpolluted water supply, 
 or for other measures of preventive medicine, the request is 
 refused, or acceded to with such crippling stinginess as to 
 be ludicrously inadequate. 
 
 Had I not been fearful of the charge of exaggeration, I 
 might have said that if our present knowledge of sanitation 
 and prevention were only applied, our death-rate might be 
 reduced by one-half. 
 
 Extend our calculations to include the 60,000,000 of 
 people of the United States, and you will realize that the 
 General Government needs a great and powerful Department
 
 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 275 
 
 of Public Health, with a Cabinet Officer at Washington, 
 and with power and appropriations to meet the exigencies 
 and dangers to life and health of our people. Such a 
 department would at once save the people more than the 
 entire expenses of the government. Write your represen- 
 tative to-morrow to help forward its passage. A bill to 
 provide a department of this kind has been introduced. As 
 a little example furnished by one of our own States, Dr. 
 Baker, of the Michigan State Board of Health, estimates 
 that in his State his Board has saved over 100 lives a year 
 from small-pox, 400 lives a year from scarlet fever, and 
 nearly 600 lives a year from diphtheria, besides many 
 more from other diseases and not capable of accurate 
 estimation. 
 
 Are you shocked that I should estimate the value of 
 human lives and suffering in dollars ? It is quite as little 
 to my liking, I assure you, but it would seem necessary in 
 order to arouse attention to the truer consideration of the 
 inestimable spiritual value of life, health, and happiness. 
 By this means I only wish to make it plain to the crudest 
 and most brutal motive that preventive medicine "pays." 
 The splendid wisdom of the English, displayed in the con- 
 tinuous decline in the general death-rate (now about 18 
 per thousand), always exactly proportioned to thoroughness 
 of vaccination, sanitation, drainage, pure food and water- 
 supply, etc., this indeed is proof beyond question that it 
 pays. These financially shrewdest of all men would not 
 spend money like water for these things if the return in 
 hard cash as well as life were not indubitably evident. 
 
 In every city a thousand times more necessary than a 
 City Hall is an Institute of Practical Preventive Medicine, 
 an organization wherein should be brought to a focus the 
 best science and the most devoted zeal to guard the health 
 and physical well-being of the people, bending every energy 
 to stamp out zymotic and unnecessary disease, to alleviate
 
 276 EVERYBODY'S MEDICAL DUTY. 
 
 and render less tragic unavoidable suffering, to brighten 
 and beautify and lengthen the lives of all. Since pity and 
 religion awakened in men's mind, the aim has been to 
 relieve the existing and produced evil, but science and intel- 
 lectual prudence now dictate that we stop evil causes, 
 forefend bad results, and strike at the sources of ill. If 
 Christ, who according to the Gospel healed the sick and 
 brought the dead to life, should come among us to-day, he 
 would be an exhorter and helper in the work of preventive 
 medicine. To prevent a death is just as great a work as 
 to bring the dead to life ; to prevent sickness even greater 
 than to cure it. Civilization demands of us prevention of 
 evil by all the methods of social cooperation, scientific pre- 
 cision and prevision. If you do not take a living interest 
 in these things you are no Christian, you do not love your 
 fellow-men and the coming generation. The religion of 
 civilization must add intellect to sympathy. Science is not 
 antagonistic to religion, it gives it eyes and hands and 
 machinery, whereby to realize its desires. True pity, intel- 
 ligent pity, means prevention. Up to now the physician's 
 work has been to cure sick persons, but from now on our 
 greater and sublimer task is to prevent sickness. In this 
 you and I must aid. This is " everybody's medical duty."
 
 THE POWER OF WILL IN DISEASE.* 
 
 After a hundred years of history and education in scien- 
 tific medicine, and in a country where shrewd common 
 sense has been developed in the most backward-looking 
 mind at such time and under such circumstances it would 
 have seemed impossible that the incurably sick, the par- 
 alyzed, and the maimed should by thousands flock to a 
 priest to be cured of their diseases. The newspapers say 
 the immense depot at Pittsburg has of late seemed like a 
 hospital, filled as it has been with the poor, unfortunate in- 
 valids seeking Father Mollinger's supernatural aid to make 
 them well. The Father anoints and blesses, and the young 
 man who " had not walked since childhood " upon com- 
 mand goes unassisted " from the altar-rail to the rear of the 
 church, to the amazement of the vast audience." Though 
 the report says the great majority are sadly disappointed 
 the squarely impossible cannot be done in these times 
 a number are found that, with functional affections, under 
 strong emotion, exhibit a change, or an increase of 
 strength, so that the belief in " the power " is kept living. 
 
 What is it that makes Father Mollinger, Christian 
 science, faith cure, medical spiritualism, and to some ex- 
 tent homeopathy possible in the nineteenth century ? 
 Were there absolutely no element of truth in these re- 
 ported " cures," even the dullest dupe would come at last to 
 some consciousness of the hocus-pocus. The manure of the 
 soil nourishing these delusions is a truth too often ignored 
 and neglected by scientific medicine. It is the truth of 
 
 * From the Medical News, June 27, 1891. 
 277
 
 278 THE POWER OF WILL IN DISEASE. 
 
 the power of the emotions, of the will of the spirit, if 
 you please over the flesh ; of life over the beginnings of 
 disease, and even over disease and death itself. Races and 
 nations differ greatly in their power of resisting and over- 
 coming disease, simply by reason of the characteristic 
 attitude of the will and the disposition of the patient to- 
 ward the physical illness. Just so do all, even brothers, 
 differ in the same way. Thousands are physically sick 
 because mental resolution and spiritual domination is weak 
 and illogical. This is strikingly true in reference to the 
 beginnings of disease. The secret of continuous good 
 health does not always consist merely in physical resist- 
 ance or robustness, but in sharply conquering the subtle 
 beginnings of corporeal abnormality by pure will-power. 
 There are two homologues of this power that illustrate it 
 exactly. Who has not seen whimsicality, crankiness, and 
 oddity by self-indulgence slowly degenerate into mono- 
 mania, and even into downright insanity ? And, again, who 
 can doubt that in the commencement many such persons 
 are perfectly conscious of the abnormal tendency, and are, 
 moreover, perfectly capable of not doing the ridiculous or 
 self- forgetful things. They are at first driven by no impe- 
 rious necessity. It is precisely so when one gives way to 
 immoral courses of life. At first the voice of conscience 
 is clear; by and by control is lost and the voice is entirely 
 silent. The analogies obtain in the matter of health. The 
 adage, " Resist the beginnings of evil," holds also here. 
 All disease begins subtly, almost insensibly, as chill, lassi- 
 tude, malaise, etc. Caught at this stage and fought down 
 by a virile volition, that which by self-indulgence would 
 have proceeded to genuine fever and illness may often be 
 resolved into routine normality of health. A brisk walk 
 of five miles in the teeth of exhaustion and weariness has 
 saved many from severe illness. And so in types of dis- 
 ease that are, if one may so speak, more organic. The
 
 THE POWER OF WILL IN DISEASE. 279 
 
 fact cannot be disputed that many who have believed them- 
 selves incapable of walking, under powerful emotion, their 
 own will being supplemented and " relayed " by that of 
 another, do really find that they can walk a little. Our 
 confutation of the priest's supernaturalism consists pre- 
 cisely in this proved power of the will. Doubtless ortho- 
 pedic appliances are often given patients who need only 
 resolution, encouragement, and repeated trial in order to 
 develop by exercise the strength that the crutch really 
 conceals or neutralizes. In the sick-room every experi- 
 enced physician knows how much depends upon the 
 morale, the resolution of the patient, and how even death 
 and life may depend upon the will. All this, when we read 
 it, seems trite enough, but its significance is lost sight of in 
 the battle of rival theories of disease, and to some it must 
 seem the froth of nonsense. But the practical lesson of 
 the very obvious truth consists in the simple duty of 
 arousing the will to self-confidence and corporeal domina- 
 tion. As has been well demonstrated, the best cure for the 
 most outrageous hysteria is mental and volitional control 
 supplanting the patient's diseased imagination by a 
 healthy one true faith-cure in a legitimate and genuine 
 sense. The puppets of fashionable automatonism are 
 prone to run to the doctor for every ache, real or sus- 
 pected. To indulge them in their folly sometimes seems 
 to the physician not without a certain worldly excuse. 
 But if a higher ethical ruling is adhered to, duty will 
 counsel encouragement of prophylaxis and hygiene ; and 
 among the means of forefending disease an energetic 
 domination of will over the body is often the most vital 
 and important.
 
 THE APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND 
 WHIMSICALITY.* 
 
 One of the functions of a medical journal is to notify its 
 readers of the appearance of new and important medical 
 works, and so deeply are we impressed with the transcend- 
 ent importance of one such book recently issued, that we 
 believe we are doing a great service to medicine by a some- 
 what extended and free advertisement of it. It is by W. A. 
 Dewey, M.D., a late professor of materia medica, an editor 
 and associate editor of numerous medical journals, an author 
 and associate author of several medical works, a member of 
 many medical societies. The last title the learned author 
 gives himself on the title-page of his book is simply this : 
 " Homoeopathic, etc., etc.," which reminds one of a drug 
 catalogued by the New York homeopathic druggist, Swan, 
 as " Omnia." The book to which we call especial atten- 
 tion is entitled: " Essentials of Homoeopathic Therapeutics, 
 being a Quiz Compend upon the Application of Homoe- 
 opathic Remedies to Diseased States," and is published by 
 Bcericke & Tafel, Philadelphia, 1895. 
 
 " One of the grand cardinal features of homoeopathy," 
 says the author in his preface, "and one little understood 
 by the allopathic school, is the fact that any drug in the 
 entire homoeopathic materia medica may be a remedy in 
 any diseased state. It is, therefore, evident that the prepa- 
 ration of this work entailed no little difficulty," etc. In 
 view of the infinite multiplication of" remedies," and of the 
 numerous different " potentizations " of each, together with 
 
 * The Medical News, March 9, 1895. 
 280
 
 APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND WHIMSICALITY. 281 
 
 the literally bewildering multiplication of " symptoms " or 
 " provings," this modest qualifying reservation is very ap- 
 propriate, as otherwise all the books that have ever been 
 printed could not contain the possible " Application of 
 Homoeopathic Remedies to Diseased States." 
 
 Before passing to the subject-matter of the volume we 
 cannot forbear a word of criticism as to the strange fatality 
 that makes it impossible for our homeopathic friends to 
 write sentences according to the fundamental rules of 
 English grammar. In reading this remarkable work, for 
 example, we seem to hear the echoes of some half-forgotten 
 patois in which philologic crudities, barbarisms, and gram- 
 matic impossibilities vie in vain with pseudoscientific 
 whimsicalities and medievalisms. The very contractions 
 used of the names of drugs make one smile, as, e.g., croton 
 tig., carbo veg., Lye., carbo an., Kali bich., etc. How can 
 one who knows that the word blepharospasm itself means 
 twitching of the lids speak of " a blepharospasmus twitching 
 of the eyelids " ? To one not conversant with occultism, 
 the works of Mme. Blavatsky, or the strange use of lan- 
 guage by the homeopaths, a large number of the sentences 
 are absolutely devoid of meaning. One wonders how 
 symptoms can be called " female symptoms " or " male 
 symptoms," what sentences without verbs can signify, what 
 the personification of drugs betokens, etc. Of these gram- 
 matic peculiarities, of which certainly every second sentence 
 is an illustration, we quote a few examples that have 
 attracted the attention : 
 
 The sensations are throbbing, which is intense and sudden, 
 and the pains are apt to cease as suddenly as they appeared. 
 
 Stramonium has visions of animals coming toward him from 
 every corner. 
 
 It is a hoarse, croupy cough, but withal a loose edge. 
 
 The patient clutches the air ; sometimes a stupor, which, if 
 aroused out of, they strike people.
 
 282 APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND WHIMSICALITY. 
 
 The child appears to have but one bowel extending from 
 mouth to anus. 
 
 The diarrhea of Thuja is a chronic diarrhea traceable to vacci- 
 nation, forcibly expelled like water from a bunghole. 
 
 What drug has nausea at the thought of food? even mention 
 food and he vomits. 
 
 Gulping up of burning water. 
 
 The patient is excitable, restless, and fidgety. They are awk- 
 ward and clumsy. 
 
 Where does Kali bich. come in ? 
 
 What drug has a great deal of depression about his chest, is 
 tearful and discouraged, and fears that he will go into decline? 
 
 Patient thinks she will go crazy, is suspicious, has visions of 
 rats, etc. ; is conscious, but can't help it. 
 
 Stannum has characteristically falling of the womb during hard 
 stools. 
 
 In glancing through this volume one is struck by the 
 almost maniacal reveling in the nasty. Every possible 
 discharge or excretory product of the body (our author 
 would call it " a secretion from the body ") is described, 
 with a vividness of language and with a fond enumeration 
 of the morbid varieties and of their unexampled filthiness ; ' 
 the catalogues of Rabelais pale before the telling word- 
 pictures of our author. This is undoubtedly due to the 
 habit of treating symptoms rather than to a distinctly 
 Rabelaisian type of mind, however. This fact may also 
 explain why spermatorrhea has the consideration of nearly 
 three pages, whilst peritonitis has but half a page ; why 
 diseases of women require nine pages, whilst tuberculosis 
 and " phthisis " combined require but three. 
 
 But this enumeration of symptoms what awful absence 
 of the sense of humor does it show, the perfect solemnity 
 with which this apotheosis of hysteria is set down ! A 
 person, we suppose, has taken an infinitesimal amount of 
 " carbo veg.," and whatever morbid whims pass through
 
 APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND WHIMSICALITY. 283 
 
 his fancy for days are supposed to be " provings " of the 
 drug, although any amount of carbo veg. in the shape of 
 toasted bread may be eaten at other times. 
 
 Thus "phosphorus has evening hoarseness, while Causti- 
 cum has morning hoarseness," " lilium is worse in the after- 
 noon, sepia in the forenoon." One drug produces a sensa- 
 tion in the right arm, another in the left arm. One pro- 
 duces headache over only the left eye, or pain in the left 
 ovary, headache upon one side of the head (" the pains 
 following the course of the sun "), etc. 
 
 The explanation of a number of national traits is sug- 
 gested by the assurance that among the mental symptoms 
 of gelsemium is mentioned, " does not seem to care whether 
 school keeps or not ; " among those of Platina, " the patient 
 is proud and haughty ; looks down upon everybody with 
 disdain ; everybody seems beneath her ; " among those of 
 Baptisia, " he thinks he is scattered about, and he must 
 move to get his pieces together again ; " in children cha- 
 momilla produces the very human trait : " want to be 
 carried about, and want different things, and when they get 
 them throw them away dissatisfied." Our neighbors, the 
 Britishers, have often wondered why we Americans " like 
 to sit with the feet on the table." They may now under- 
 stand that it is due to " the effect of carbo veg. on the liver." 
 Profanity, it would logically seem, might be lessened by 
 restricting the sale of nitric acid. 
 
 In private practice we have often been told by patients 
 that they had been given medicines for cataract for years 
 by homeopathic practicers, and lo ! here, Anno Domini 
 1895, is phosphorus commended therefor! 
 
 It is little wonder that the animosity against the " allo- 
 path " is so great that a drug having a general exorcising 
 or purifying effect is recommended as " the first remedy to 
 use if the case comes from allopathic hands." 
 
 Quotation is better and more just to the talented author
 
 286 APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND WHIMSICALITY. 
 
 What is the Graphites temperament in general ? Sad, fat, fair, 
 and constipated. 
 
 What drug has the symptom that the soul feels as though it 
 were freed from the body? 
 
 What drug has special action on the right wrist ? 
 
 The Natrum carb. patient gets very nervous during thunder 
 storms and hides in the cellar. This nervousness is said to be 
 due to the electrical condition of the atmosphere acting on such 
 patients. 
 
 Pulsatilla is mild, tearful, and whimsical. Sepia is depressed, 
 easily excited, and irritable. Pulsatilla blondes. Sepia bru- 
 nettes. 
 
 Medicine is a serious study and the medical life is pro- 
 verbially a solemn one. Perhaps we have quoted too ex- 
 tensively from our valued author, but his teachings we trust 
 may be found at least temporarily a good " regular " dose 
 antidotal of the gloominess of our calling. The richest and 
 most perfect humor in the world is the unconscious variety, 
 that wherein the most profoundly earnest joker dreams 
 least of all things that he is producing a work that will in- 
 spire most uproarious laughter in thousands of readers. 
 
 But after the laugh the return to work ! After the fun 
 the payment of the bills ! Thereupon come the indigna- 
 tion and the disgust the thought that it is for the encour- 
 agement of this sort of nauseating drivel that our aristocratic 
 society gives "charity balls;" for this that our legislators 
 vote hundreds of thousands of dollars of the people's 
 money ; this gibbering ghost of medieval medicine it is that 
 an intelligent and discriminating people call the " new 
 school " !
 
 CHARACTER* 
 
 In a general way, it is doubtless true that the great 
 mistake of men, of all men, consists in the failure to 
 estimate the value of character. Everybody is prone to 
 put the good of life in something gained or done, in 
 knowledge, in some objective thing, as wealth, power over 
 men, ability to make much of self, etc. But apart from 
 this general injudiciousness of mankind there are certain 
 ages or peoples which thus err especially and grievously. 
 It is an error, for example, markedly common in a young 
 nation or people, when great public works are to be carried 
 through and tremendous energy is to be put forth or 
 utilized. The man who can win battles, who can plan and 
 build a railroad, who can procure needed legislation, 
 organize and manage manufactories, he is the man people 
 want, and they care little or not at all whether he be 
 honest, pure, high-minded, unselfish, or whether he be the 
 reverse of these things. 
 
 By and by, however, with a better civilization, there 
 comes the knowledge, gained by bitter experience, that 
 the emotional and moral make-up of a man, his character, 
 as contradistinguished from his ability to do things, have 
 as much, or more, to do with our trust of him, with his 
 " success" even, as his ability to do things. As more and 
 more men compete for the same office or work to do, it 
 is found that the larger type of personality, the man who 
 has character as well as ability, is the better man to endow 
 with trust and power. 
 
 * From the Medical News, December I, 1894. 
 287
 
 286 APOTHEOSIS OF HYSTERIA AND WHIMSICALITY. 
 
 What is the Graphites temperament in general ? Sad, fat, fair, 
 and constipated. 
 
 What drug has the symptom that the soul feels as though it 
 were freed from the body? 
 
 What drug has special action on the right wrist ? 
 
 The Natrum carb. patient gets very nervous during thunder 
 storms and hides in the cellar. This nervousness is said to be 
 due to the electrical condition of the atmosphere acting on such 
 patients. 
 
 Pulsatilla is mild, tearful, and whimsical. Sepia is depressed, 
 easily excited, and irritable. Pulsatilla blondes. Sepia bru- 
 nettes. 
 
 Medicine is a serious study and the medical life is pro- 
 verbially a solemn one. Perhaps we have quoted too ex- 
 tensively from our valued author, but his teachings we trust 
 may be found at least temporarily a good " regular " dose 
 antidotal of the gloominess of our calling. The richest and 
 most perfect humor in the world is the unconscious variety, 
 that wherein the most profoundly earnest joker dreams 
 least of all things that he is producing a work that will in- 
 spire most uproarious laughter in thousands of readers. 
 
 But after the laugh the return to work ! After the fun 
 the payment of the bills ! Thereupon come the indigna- 
 tion and the disgust the thought that it is for the encour- 
 agement of this sort of nauseating drivel that our aristocratic 
 society gives "charity balls;" for this that our legislators 
 vote hundreds of thousands of dollars of the people's 
 money ; this gibbering ghost of medieval medicine it is that 
 an intelligent and discriminating people call the " new 
 school"!
 
 CHARACTER* 
 
 In a general way, it is doubtless true that the great 
 mistake of men, of all men, consists in the failure to 
 estimate the value of character. Everybody is prone to 
 put the good of life in something gained or done, in 
 knowledge, in some objective thing, as wealth, power over 
 men, ability to make much of self, etc. But apart from 
 this general injudiciousness of mankind there are certain 
 ages or peoples which thus err especially and grievously. 
 It is an error, for example, markedly common in a young 
 nation or people, when great public works are to be carried 
 through and tremendous energy is to be put forth or 
 utilized. The man who can win battles, who can plan and 
 build a railroad, who can procure needed legislation, 
 organize and manage manufactories, he is the man people 
 want, and they care little or not at all whether he be 
 honest, pure, high-minded, unselfish, or whether he be the 
 reverse of these things. 
 
 By and by, however, with a better civilization, there 
 comes the knowledge, gained by bitter experience, that 
 the emotional and moral make-up of a man, his character, 
 as contradistinguished from his ability to do things, have 
 as much, or more, to do with our trust of him, with his 
 " success" even, as his ability to do things. As more and 
 more men compete for the same office or work to do, it 
 is found that the larger type of personality, the man who 
 has character as well as ability, is the better man to endow 
 with trust and power. 
 
 * From the Medical News, December I, 1894. 
 287
 
 288 CHARACTER. 
 
 It is just in such a condition that we Americans now 
 find ourselves. We have heretofore been content to give 
 over our cities, States, manufactories, banks, and institu- 
 tions of a thousand kinds to the persons who by hook or 
 crook could get hold of them, or who could do the work 
 required. Now at last we are finding out that upon the 
 quality of a man's personal character, in a word, upon his 
 morality, will depend the success or failure of the thing 
 done, quite as much as or even more than upon executive 
 ability, knowledge, or will-power. It is not the most expert 
 bookkeeper or cashier that is the best one to put in charge 
 of millions of dollars, but it is the most loyal and honest. 
 It is not the best, most successful administrative ability 
 that now makes the best administrator. In every walk of 
 life, from governing the nation, the city, or the push-cart, 
 we are daily admonished that the perfection of a man's 
 work depends upon the honor and honesty of the man's 
 character. The power of the mere doer, the knowledge 
 of the knower, the skill of the executor, are growing less 
 important, and are coming more and more to depend upon 
 how the thing is done, upon honor and conscience in the 
 doer. In the long run nowadays the man, honest but 
 stupid, if we must drive the comparison to its rather absurd 
 extreme, gains upon the brilliant scoundrel. But as almost 
 no American can be called stupid, so it follows that the 
 combination of conscience with ability now constitutes the 
 highest type of man. 
 
 These rather trite truths have their apt and striking 
 application to medicine but with the proviso that we are 
 hardly yet beyond the first stage of the evolutionary pro- 
 cess. We have hardly begun to be more than half-con- 
 scious of our barbarism of caring nothing for a physician's 
 character, providing he is said to cure disease, or wins 
 " success." The consequence is* that we have plenty of 
 medical Tweeds and Tammanies, our thousandfold quack-
 
 CHARACTER. 289 
 
 cries, etc., all dependent upon the custom of not consider- 
 ing a man's character, but only considering his ability to 
 get official position, or a big practice, to write a book, to 
 deliver lectures, to attract the public eye, etc. 
 
 Now we contend that it is high time that we undertake 
 the real work of genuine medical civilization. Sincerity 
 and honor are as much needed to make a good physician 
 as trickiness and smartness. The smart man, who is also 
 a trickster, however infernally smart he may be, is hence- 
 forth to be more and more avoided. Whatever he says 
 or does he is only after self, and medicine is his ladder 
 and tool. The man whose laboratory-experiments are 
 untrustworthy, who is always appearing in the daily papers 
 under some pretext or other, whose language is habitually 
 a nasty mixture of slang, oaths, or vulgarity, whose private 
 life is filled with trickery and politics such a man, how- 
 ever " sharp " and " able," is no longer fit to be a teacher 
 of young men ; patients should not be sent him, and office 
 should not be given him. A man who makes, derives pro- 
 fit from, or indorses secret preparations should be practi- 
 cally disowned by his fellows in all ways by limiting his 
 power. A man who fleeces the public, and thus injures 
 the reputation of the profession by charging fees farcically 
 outrageous for inconsiderable operations needs to be 
 incontinently squelched. The man "with a pull," who 
 hoggishly gobbles up and uses for selfish purposes dozens 
 of hospital-positions, excluding other quiet, modest men 
 of equal ability, nay, even holding them in menial subser- 
 viency such men should be avoided by trustees and other 
 dispensers of power. The ringsters who unite into a clique 
 for mutual advantage and profit by all the scheming and 
 politically vile means in their power they also need dis- 
 gracing. The huckster, the schemer, the politician (usually 
 he is one person), is to-day the worst enemy of medicine. 
 25
 
 290 CHARACTER. 
 
 He corrupts at the source; he is the big quack in the better 
 disguise. 
 
 In many ways we need to begin the task of discrimina- 
 tion and of rewarding men of modesty, honor, gentleman- 
 liness, and conscience, instead of neglecting them and fill- 
 ing positions with the schemers, the self-puffers, the news- 
 paper-doctors, and all the " pushers " who use medicine as 
 a mere tool to further self. This is because the method of 
 learning a diagnosis, or of treating a patient, or of doing 
 anything, is often as important as the thing itself, and is 
 indispensable to correct results. The best therapeutist, the 
 best curer of disease, is not he who only knows best, but 
 he who is most conscientious, sympathetic, and self-forget- 
 ful ; the best surgeon is not the most expert operator, but 
 he who will not operate when operation is not necessary. 
 The most successful physician is not he who has most 
 patients and makes the most money, but he who most suc- 
 cessfully cures disease. The best teacher is not necessa- 
 rily he who talks the glibbest or who is the most " popular," 
 but he who helps his pupils to learn the best and most 
 accurate knowledge, and who inspires them with the enthu- 
 siasm for knowledge and for the relief of human ills. 
 
 Are you a trustee or a dispenser of office or of power of 
 any kind? There are hundreds of self-respecting, earnest, 
 capable, honest, quiet men who deserve your consideration, 
 and who will fill the position you have to give far better, 
 more to the honor of the profession, more to the good of 
 humanity, than the " hustler," the famous infamous fellow 
 who fills your mail with splendid testimonials of his attain- 
 ments and capacity, and who cronies with newspaper- 
 reporters, " works the club-racket," and is as careless of 
 medical ethics as he is careful of self-advancement. 
 
 If you are no appointment-giver you at times require a 
 consultant. Do you believe you or your patient will
 
 CHARACTER. 291 
 
 secure better advice from the business-doctor, the con- 
 sultation-hunter, the man with much fame, savory or 
 unsavory ? Or, is it not more likely you will do better by 
 consulting with one who studies deeply, who is most 
 scrutinizing, accurate, in other words, whose acts and life 
 bespeak intelligent conscience as the ruling characteristic, 
 and not egotism, " business," or love of fame. At least, 
 you are a member of some medical society. Can you not 
 help to refuse office to the office-seeker and the politician ? 
 Can you not detect and estop the ringsters when they try 
 to refuse membership to the worthy, and when they try 
 to "run in "the unworthy? Blackballing the good man, 
 receiving the bad man, are too common as they are too 
 frightful mistakes. 
 
 In no way can we mold the future and make the world 
 better for our children, freer from disease, than to encourage 
 the formation of noble medical character by helping to 
 office and by rewarding and consulting with those who are 
 seeking to keep their characters pure and clean. In no 
 way are we more recreant to our trust than by giving 
 attention to the advertiser, by helping a despicable char- 
 acter to power simply because he has enormous effrontery 
 and egotism coupled with more or less of flashy superficial 
 medical knowledge and fame.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN.* 
 
 Some time ago I was present at a lecture wherein the 
 speaker, in alluding to a certain skull, incidentally spoke 
 of it as belonging to " the criminal type of crania." A 
 brain that had been hardened either by world-wear, by 
 chemical action, or by the lecturer's logic, was also alluded 
 to as belonging to " the crime-class." There was in all 
 this a sort of " taken-for-granted " air of assurance that 
 aroused in me a multitude of questionings and doubts. 
 The gentleman was an adept, I, a novice, and I felt I ought 
 also to adopt the " already settled," " it-goes-without- 
 saying " air with which he calmly put aside what I had 
 supposed the inexorable laws of nature and of sociologic 
 evolution. Have we indeed " changed all that," I said to 
 myself, and I went home seriously to ask myself when a 
 man becomes an embezzler or " boodler," kills his mistress, 
 guzzles too much whisky, gets cranky or clean daft, or 
 kicks his wife, if it is all because his " atypical " skull or 
 brain determined his atypical conduct. It is, indeed, true 
 that we must always hold ourselves ready to reconsider 
 the truth of such old bits of bigotry and dogmatism as 
 that two and two make four, or that it is advisable for most 
 of us to take food in order to live very long. In this 
 modest and submissive mood I asked for instruction. I 
 read without prejudice whatever I could find on the ques- 
 tion by alienists, neurologists, cerebrologists, craniologists, 
 and penologists, and I regret to say that I have found in 
 
 * Read before the Medical Jurisprudence Society of Philadelphia, May 14, 
 1889. Published in the Open Court, 1889. 
 
 292
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 293 
 
 my reading that the medical profession is pretty generally 
 leaning toward the view that not only insanity but also 
 crime is the result of disease. All through this literature 
 I have found the terms, " Homicidal Mania," " Moral In- 
 sanity," " Inheritance of Criminality," " Insane Criminals," 
 " Moral Anesthesia," " Negro, Simian, and Fetal Peculi- 
 arities," etc., etc. 
 
 One writer says that " inebriates are grown and manu- 
 factured, as much so as cotton and wool, and the machines 
 to work them into fabrics;" another says, "the true thief 
 is born, not made." " The passion for gambling may be 
 acquired by the fetus in utero" is another dictum of a 
 famous writer. " The brains of criminals exhibit a devia- 
 tion from the normal type, and criminals are to be viewed as 
 an anthropological variety of their species," says Benedikt, 
 the Moses of this " peculiar people." The popular plebifi- 
 cations of so-called " Science " concerning " A Family of 
 Criminals," " The Famous Jukes Case," and the everlasting 
 reappearance of the six-fingered and six-toed gentry in 
 the devil's popular bible, the Sunday newspaper, such 
 things as these make us wish that sterility had also been 
 an inherited quality of the mothers of certain newspaper 
 " scientists " and writers. To be brief, let us crowd the 
 matter into a sentence and say, that the tendency of this 
 school is to wipe out the distinctions between morals and 
 medicine, obliterate the line between sanity and insanity, 
 and exonerate every criminal from responsibility on the 
 assumed ground of a special neurosis or a defective brain. 
 This is the tendency, more or less plainly expressed or 
 implied, but, at least, necessitated by the premises and 
 by a frank logic. 
 
 But is it either a good tendency or a true conclusion ? 
 Is it either good science or good sense ? Is it good 
 morals ? I believe it is neither, and these are some of my 
 reasons for so disbelieving :
 
 294 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 I. It is asserted that criminals and the insane have " de- 
 fective, retarded, and aberrant brain development," and 
 that therefore their crimes and follies are anatomically or 
 pathologically necessitated. The common conclusion of 
 the studies of Benedikt*, Badikf, Ten Kate and Pavloskyf, 
 Corre and Rousel, Marro and Lombroso||, Lombroso^f, 
 Varaglia**, Millsft, Tenchini||, etc., is that the brains and 
 skulls of these classes are atypical or unsymmetrical. 
 This statement is both true and untrue. I mean that as an 
 abstract statement it is probably true and may be willingly 
 admitted. But I wish first to illustrate the spirit of many 
 of these inquiries by a quotation from Benedikt, who 
 frankly says of his observations that " they were collected 
 as the result of an a priori conviction that the criminal is 
 an overloaded individual having the same relation to crime 
 as his next of blood-kin the epileptic, and his cousin the 
 idiot, have to their encephalopathic condition." Others 
 have been less blunt in avowing their prejudice, but it seems 
 to have governed the studies of most. Moreover, if you 
 look for atypism you will certainly find it. Why ? Be- 
 cause it is to be found in criminals and the insane just as 
 well as in other good folk. It may reasonably be doubted 
 if there is a perfectly symmetrical skull or perfectly typical 
 
 *" The Brains of Criminals." 
 
 f Summary in Phila. Med. Times, Vol. xv, 1884, p. 50. 
 
 \ " Sur quelques Cranes," etc., Rev. d'Anthrop., Paris, 1881. 
 
 %" Etude d'un Serie de ttes," etc., Rev. d'Anthrop., Paris, 1883. 
 
 || " Reflessi tendinei," etc., Arch, di Psichiat., Tornio, 1883. 
 
 f " La pazzia Morale," etc., Arch, di Psichiat., Tornio, 1882. " Fosso 
 occipitali," etc., Arch, di Psichiat., Tornio, 1883. " Sul mancinismo motorio," 
 etc., Gior. d. r. accad. di Med. di Tornio, 1884. 
 
 **" Note Anatom.," etc., Arch, di Psichiat., Tornio, 1885. 
 
 ft " On Arrested and Aberrant Devel.," etc., Jour. Nerv. df Ment. Dis., 
 September, 1886. 
 
 JJ"Notesur la crfite," etc., Actes Cong. Internal, d'anthrop. Crim., 
 Rome, 1886.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 295 
 
 brain in the world. What do we mean by typical ? Cor- 
 respondence to an ideal perfection and symmetry. But 
 such actualities nowhere exist. No man ever saw a sym- 
 metrical leaf or tree, a symmetrical skull or brain. And 
 yet despite their determination to find it, if possible, Badik 
 and others are forced to confess that but a part of their 
 criminal skulls and brains were " aberrant," " unsymmet- 
 rical," " negroid," or " simian." It may be said that the 
 contention of the more moderate is that in the classes 
 considered there is greater atypism than in the average 
 member of the community. But that is not proved. The 
 conclusion of the investigations so far proves only that a 
 certain number of criminal brains and skulls are atypical. 
 Very well ! But what about those that, so far as discover- 
 able, are normal ? And what about those sane folks with 
 atypical skulls ? The Greek skeptic shown the offerings 
 of rescued shipwrecked mariners who had in the hour of 
 peril devoted these presents to the god, calmly asked, 
 where also were the offerings of those not saved. No 
 large, careful, and scientific measuring of the sane and 
 moral has been made and compared with that of the insane 
 and criminal. Clevenger doubts if any differences could be 
 found in such a comparative examination. Science means 
 prevision, but if the brains and crania of the ten last dead 
 from the State Prison, the Insane Asylum, and yesterday's 
 railroad disaster were gathered, there is no expert or set 
 of cerebrologists in the world could either put the thirty 
 brains back in their proper cases or designate with any 
 certainty to what class of the three any one belonged. No 
 man from the criminal history of the life alone can tell you 
 in advance a single peculiarity of the brain of the man hung 
 to-day. The cranium and brain of Pigott are said to have 
 been of exceptional symmetry and perfection, and yet he in- 
 vented Pigottry, having first practiced it all his life. The 
 skull of an excellent physician of this city has, on account
 
 296 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 of its astonishing asymmetry, been noticed and marveled at 
 across the amphitheater. It is needless to say he belongs 
 " sans phrase " to the nonanatomical school of cerebrolo- 
 gists. 
 
 Thus not only is the so-called fact not proved, and so far 
 utterly without significance, but the interpretation of the 
 fact is a non sequitur. It does not follow, nor is it proved, 
 that defective, aberrant, atypical, or simian brains and skulls 
 imply immorality or insanity. Functional defect there may 
 be, but neither scalpel nor microscope has proved any other 
 to exist. If he does not know from what animal it came, 
 no expert could tell whether a sheep's brain or that of a 
 tiger were the more crime-producing one. Post hoc is not 
 propter hoc, as philosophers have to be warned a hundred 
 times a day. How tired we get hallooing at these propter 
 hoc hunters to call them from the way their game has not 
 taken. Away they go again after their post hoc, whilst all 
 the time their Reynard, their propter hoc, sits calmly on the 
 fence watching and chuckling at them. " Deficient gyri- 
 development and asymmetry " may necessitate the poor 
 owner to be a thief or a lunatic, but I think the shape of the 
 pisiform bone should also be considered. Artemus Ward 
 said he knew a man in Oregon who hadn't a tooth in his 
 head, not a single tooth, and yet this same man could beat 
 the bass-drum better than any other man he ever heard. 
 
 I cannot forbear to impale another and related pleasantry 
 of these logicians: this is the unjustifiable humanity-con- 
 ceit that like a hideous Jack-in-the-box springs at you in 
 the sneer of the words " simian," " negroid," " reversion to 
 the animal type," etc., when speaking of these atypical 
 brains. I ask in all sincerity and seriousness, if we are a jot 
 more moral than our remote simian forefathers ? Nay, are 
 we not even less so ? Take a thousand members of the 
 New York and Chicago Stock Exchange, and a thousand 
 monkeys in a cage or in their native woods, which set of
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 297 
 
 gentlemen will break the eleven commandments the greater 
 number of times Anno Domini 1889? As to the shame- 
 less " negroid," who was the greater sinner, the white slave- 
 holder or his victim ? Or read the astounding and horrible 
 record revealed in the official statement of the pardons 
 granted convicts by the Governor of South Carolina, also in 
 the year of our Lord 1888.* Such facts as this last, and 
 such theories as we are discussing, almost make one say, as 
 the joker did of life, it is one-half if, and three-fourths lie. 
 
 2. In the second place, this theory is contradicted by 
 the law of biologic evolution. Throughout the countless 
 ages of organic development, life has preceded function, 
 and function has preceded morphology, f 
 
 Habitual action creates peculiarity of structure ; desire 
 begets its own instruments. Character is inherited before 
 its organs, if it have any, appear. Nay, more ; character, 
 in truth, creates its organs. How in the name of common 
 sense could it be otherwise? 
 
 Hunger existed before stomachs, eating produced teeth, 
 fighting begot horns, the snake's enemy existed before his 
 fangs and poison-sacs. In precisely the same way, if crime 
 and crankiness have an anatomic basis, it is because ras- 
 cality and folly preceded any structural instrumentalities or 
 peculiarities. If we are seeking the origin of crime, we 
 cannot, in the name of reason, expect to find it by the cart- 
 before-horse logic of supposing an organ can exist prior to 
 the desire and function of which it is the instrument. 
 
 * See The Nation, April 4, 1889. 
 
 f Hydra viridis, for example, has no eyes and is yet sensitive to light ; no 
 brain or nerves and yet lies in wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees from 
 danger. Turned inside out it lives and digests as well as before. It holds live 
 worms down with an arm when they try to get out of its stomach. Any part 
 reproduces all. Cut off the bottom of its stomach and it goes on eating the 
 same as ever, the food, of course, falling out of the bottom, in this last respect 
 not unlike certain fact-gatherers without a logical stomach-bottom to digest 
 their large eating. 
 26
 
 298 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 3. A sound metaphysic, psychology, and cerebrology, 
 each, also drives a nail in the coffin. The morality or 
 sanity of a man is his action and nature as a unit; these 
 qualities relate only to conduct as a whole. There can be 
 no conceivable localization of function of morality or 
 reason. These things consist in the use the mind puts all 
 its centers to ; they refer to the animus of the soul itself 
 that inhabits and uses all organs as its instruments. Inter- 
 ference with the action of a part or the whole of the brain, 
 nay, even nondevelopment of the brain as a whole, cannot 
 change the true quality of the action of the mind ; it can 
 only lessen its effectiveness. The hand of a liar and the 
 hand of an honest man do not differ. It is the liar and 
 the honest man that are different. If the hand do not 
 differ, neither can the brain-centers that mediate between 
 desire and function. I know very well, to speak before 
 modern scientific men of " the soul " and as if there were a 
 somewhat behind cerebral ganglia using them as a master 
 does tools, is quite certain to raise many smiles, and secure 
 one the pitying contempt due to the stupid worshiper of 
 some semibarbaric image when the newer and more elegant 
 faith is the vogue. The fashionables enjoy the sweetness of 
 their supposed superior wisdom ; the poor dolt the sweet- 
 ness of his fetich and his faith. But in crying, " Great is 
 Diana," the fashionable worshipers of Materialism should 
 remember that the walls of logic and of fact that shelter the 
 old spiritualistic boobies and their altars are quite as firm 
 as ever. Omne vivum ex ovo is the legend of the doorway, 
 and Archebiosis is the myth. Many of the supposed 
 arch-priests of Materialism are in fact traitors in this 
 respect, Spencer and Huxley,* for example. 
 
 * (See Spencer's Biology, Vol. I, pp. 222, 253, etc.) Spencer's position is 
 well known. Here is a gem from Huxley : " Cells are no more the producers 
 of vital phenomena than the shells scattered in orderly lines along the sea- 
 beach are the instruments by which the force of the moon's gravity acts upon
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 299 
 
 4. But the happiest of the funeral-attendants will be 
 ethics. Determinism is the ally of Materialism. The step 
 from this belief in the anatomic nature of crime and loss 
 of self-control to absolute fatalism is a small one indeed. 
 If we lie because a gyrus gets kinked or is wanting, rob 
 the till because of our simian kind of brain, and choke the 
 girl to death that jilts us because of our cerebral asym- 
 metry, then it follows that every sane act and thought 
 and emotion is predetermined by our neurologic anatomy. 
 The delight in which certain logic-choppers revel in break- 
 ing down the barriers of self-dependence and the belief in 
 individual freedom is quite wonderful. It is hardly explain- 
 able except upon the somewhat insulting assumption that, 
 themselves feeling and desiring no moral freedom, they 
 prefer the tyranny of structure as an excuse for not follow- 
 ing the higher law. Benedikt has a funny story that he, of 
 course, tells in all seriousness. He says he asked an " in- 
 telligent counterfeiter " if, circumstances permitting, he 
 would again repeat his crime. For a reply the intelligent 
 counterfeiter said : " When I die, I will you my skull and 
 brain." The old Dryasdust sagely observes that this 
 answer was more correct than any given by philosopher or 
 criminalist as to the psychology of crime. I could not help 
 thinking I would like to have seen the glittering leer of 
 the counterfeiter, evidently a fine joker, as, " flattering his 
 humor to the top of his bent," his victim turned away. 
 The curb-stone logic of the matter is that if asymmetry 
 produces crankiness and crime, then, in the future, all that 
 embryonic cranks and criminals will have to do to excuse 
 their depraved desires is to consult a professor of this new 
 phrenology, and, the diagnosis of " atypism " once settled, 
 they will hasten home to indulge their " inherited neuro- 
 
 the ocean. Like these, the cells mark only where the vital tides have been 
 and how they have acted."
 
 300 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 sis " and " moral anesthesia " by crack-walking, wife-beat- 
 ing, intelligent counterfeiting, or the innocent pleasures of 
 " homicidal mania." 
 
 If Guiteau had known his brain was " congenitally asym- 
 metrical," the disappointed office-seeker would probably 
 have tried his marksmanship on an earlier President. It 
 may be that fatalism is true, but if so, this universe is a 
 stupendous and horrifying failure and farce, and the theory 
 that premises fatalism had better pause before thus giving 
 the lie to both God and man. 
 
 Are we not indeed fully conscious, we who are honest 
 and true, that within us burns a light no trick of matter 
 can quench, a power to resist the weaknesses and the 
 tyrannies of flesh and desire, and that in all our lives there 
 is, or may be, a moral force and an intellectual prevision 
 to which heredity is the obedient slave ? 
 
 5. Moreover, just as inevitably as this theory leads to 
 fatalism and hence to immorality, it also leads to economic 
 injustice. All things, good or bad, are measurable by the 
 tally-stick of financial justice. I protest that the general 
 tendency of this hypothesis, and of its corollaries, is to cre- 
 ate lunatics and criminals and to shield criminality with 
 the cloak of insanity. As a result, the expense of main- 
 taining the defective and criminal classes, and of keeping 
 up both the sham and the reality of legal justice, is increas- 
 ing faster than the population. This expense has to be 
 borne by the producer. Who is he ? The producer, whom 
 present methods do in reality punish, is he that quenches 
 in himself the beginnings of folly and unwisdom ; is he that 
 throttles in their inception the promptings of over-indul- 
 gence and disregard for others' rights ; he that works for 
 himself rather than scheme and cheat others out of their 
 earnings. In other words, the popular practice and theory 
 punishes a man for preserving his sanity and honor by 
 burdening him with the support of the thriftless and the 
 depraved.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 301 
 
 6. Lastly, this wearisome absurdity is to be condemned 
 because it is contrary to God's law pardon me, I mean 
 the law of natural selection and unavoidably creates the 
 evil it deplores. It is no more nor less than a reward held 
 out to all neurasthenics and hysterics, all lazy-bones and 
 cheats, to indulge their criminal leanings and inordinate 
 appetites. Since time began wise and kind old Mother 
 Nature has found that, loving the many as she does, rather 
 than the few, the only true love of all is the law, Vauriens 
 and vicious to the wall ! Civilization has suddenly grown 
 wiser than the divine or cosmic source whence it sprang 
 and thinks it has found a better way. But is not a man 
 to be written down as an ass that scorns his father and 
 mother ? The modern conceit, that we know better than 
 God and nature, seems but simply more egregiously and 
 more impiously long-eared. 
 
 It is the glory of fine minds and hearts to bear as their 
 secret motto, socii Dei sumus ; but the modern paraphrase 
 is, socii diaboli sumus. By our brutal pity and by our cruel 
 sympathy we are piling up the burden of the future, in our 
 coddling of debility and in our nursing of deceit, both of 
 which easy is the descent to hell hasten to full-fledge 
 into slum, asylum, and prison problems. Pity without 
 justice is itself crime. There is no greater sinner against 
 society than the indiscriminate alms-giver. By encourag- 
 ing self-delusion, and discouraging self-control, this theory 
 of anatomically necessitated crime operates to deteriorate 
 the average virility of the race and so immensely increases 
 suffering. There is always a vast horde of incarnate canine 
 appetites in human society restlessly awaiting the slipping 
 of the leash of law and labor to rush baying after the temp- 
 tations of indulgence, vice, and crime. That society and 
 that science are the better assured of perpetuity that tighten 
 rather than cut both collar and leash. 
 
 It will have been noticed, and you doubtless have mar-
 
 302 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 veled, that I face and treat this problem in a novel way ; it 
 may be thought that I have allowed feeling rather than 
 reason to dictate, and that my tirade were better addressed 
 to the vulgar many rather than to the scientific few. But 
 it has been with "malice aforethought" that I have thus 
 written, believing as I do that the present so-called "scien- 
 tific " attitude of the profession as to this matter is, in truth, 
 inexplainable otherwise ; I mean to say that this tendency 
 to erase the word responsibility from the dictionary of law 
 and sociology is itself the unreasoning, unscientific voice 
 of our age and generation. Unconsciously, but none the 
 less truly, it is flattery of the Zeitgeist, and flattery of that 
 capricious and greedy goddess is for clear-thinking and 
 straight-seeing people the one unpardonable sin, the sin 
 against the Holy Ghost. The Zeitgeist and the Heilige 
 Geist are two quite different things. The Zeitgeist is never 
 in the right. Vox populi is never vox Dei.* 
 
 We have, for example, to close the book from sheer 
 shuddering when we read of the malignity and diablerie 
 with which criminals and lunatics were treated in the past. 
 It seems impossible that so-called criminals were slowly 
 roasted for hours or days while the spectacle was made 
 the gayest of all festal occasions by laughing maidens and 
 flirting cavaliers. The smell of burning flesh and the 
 writhings and cries of the agonized victims were sweet to 
 these strange fiends. We can hardly believe that idiots 
 and madmen were chained in filth for years, kept immersed 
 in ice-water for days, whirled in rotating machines till their 
 tormenters were tired, etc., etc. We flatter ourselves, how- 
 ever, when we think we are wiser. Our present lachry- 
 mose barbarism is in the first place quite as cruel to some 
 one and is explainable only as the contrary swing of the 
 pendulum to the opposite extreme. 
 
 * " Maximus erroris populus magister." Coke.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 303 
 
 One extreme always begets its opposite in the fickle, 
 passions of popular feeling. Physicians should at least 
 know something about the law of action and reaction. It 
 is quite as true law in history as in pathology. We have 
 only substituted an indirect and weak maleficence for a 
 direct and brutal malevolence. Never for a moment have 
 we thought that our feelings should have had no voice in 
 the matter, but that justice, utility, and prophylaxis should 
 have been the rules. This question cannot be studied 
 apart from its relations and historical connections. It is a 
 sociological question, and all such questions and theories 
 must be judged by their results, logical or actual. A thing 
 may be true in itself but false in its relations and pernicious 
 in its consequences. Many true things are untrue. Es- 
 tablish foundling-hospitals, where the brats of lubricity are 
 cared for better than the sweater-babies, and at once con- 
 cupiscence doubles and trebles the number of illegitimate 
 and syphilitic starvelings. The world's greatest statistician, 
 Dr. Farr, stigmatizes the shame of race-deterioration that 
 we permit in allowing the imbecile, idle, criminal, and defec- 
 tive classes to breed ad libitum. Prof. A. Graham Bell * 
 says by permitting intermarriages we are actually produc- 
 ing a deaf-mute variety of the race. 
 
 And this brings us to the essence of the whole matter : 
 the origin of criminals and the mentally diseased. Sup- 
 pose, for argument's sake, we admit that some lunatics 
 and even some criminals are what they are by the force of 
 organic and anatomic necessity. What then ? Only this, 
 that we are then bound to ask how the " moral anes- 
 thesia " and " cerebral atypism " came into being. In 
 obedience to what necessity or desire, in response to what 
 peculiarity of the environment, did these defective brains 
 and skulls arise ? The bat's wing, the seal's fin, a cat's 
 
 * Science, April 17, 1885.
 
 304 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 paw, a horse's foot, a man's hand, these modifications- of 
 one primal organ were molded by the needs of the crea- 
 ture and the actions of the environment into their different 
 shapes. These two things, then, we have to consider : first, 
 the rascal or fool per se, his needs, desires, tendencies, etc., 
 and, second, the environment that creates and encourages 
 the rascal and fool. 
 
 As to the first inquiry, I again assert that if law-breakers 
 or wrecked minds are such by the stringent necessity of 
 their inherited cerebral defects a fact I by no means 
 admit, then it follows that we must go to the parents. It 
 cannot be argued that heredity forces us back ad infinitnm, 
 either to the biblical Adam or to our simian ancestry. In 
 this case we are not " bound to go the whole ourang," 
 because, on the one hand, the old myth, wise as it was, was 
 not science; and, again, because old Mother Nature, left to 
 her own grand wisdom, soon cuts short both crank and 
 criminal with summary kindness. At the farthest we shall 
 only have to go back but one or two generations to find 
 the criminal and the lunatic in the making. The eye that 
 pierces shams sees it all about every day, this subtle secret 
 manufacturing. However heinous and horrible, all lunacy 
 and all iniquity began at some time with slight and repeti- 
 tive, but always conscious, departures from right living and 
 right thinking. * The duty of sound minds, sound medi- 
 cine, and sound science is to check and stop these depar- 
 tures. Withstand beginnings, is the logic of all health, 
 mental or moral. 
 
 Like a bear by the ears Materialism always lugs in this 
 question of heredity wherewith to frighten the children of 
 the spirit. But with amazing illogicality it begs the whole 
 question in coolly assuming that only matter can inherit, 
 
 * Justice Stephen recognized this when he says in reference to crime that 
 the excuse of defective mental power, etc., does not hold " if the absence of 
 the power of self-control has been produced by his own default."
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 305 
 
 whilst every fact of embryology and organic evolution 
 shows it is the soul, the spirit, the character, that inherits 
 and that molds the organs of mind into shapes consonant 
 with its own immaterial heritages. It may be asked : If 
 structure is not inherited, what then is inherited ? and I, 
 in turn, ask : If structure is inherited, when is it inherited ? 
 Is there any recognizable atypism in the fetus ? No, it 
 only exists some 20 or 40 years after the tendency has been 
 inherited, and after conception has taken place. Tendency 
 was inherited, and tendency, if you please, produced the 
 atypism or the criminal. The ovum or spermatozoid, a 
 structureless cell of the most primitive protoplasm, so 
 small that it is invisible to the naked eye, contains the sum- 
 mary of millions of past lives and the possibilities of mil- 
 lions to come, for each bearing numberless inherited 
 peculiarities even to the curl of hair and peculiarity of 
 speech. Where is the inherited structure in this tiny speck 
 of matter ? The inheritance of power to make structure is 
 NOT the inheritance of structure. The liar puts his brain to 
 lying uses ; the same brain could mediate truth quite as 
 well. The lie is not in the brain ; it is in the liar. If you 
 please, the liar and his brain are two quite distinguishable 
 somewhats. Moreover, this so-called " iron law of her- 
 edity " is very flexible steel, aye, is utterly limp in the hands 
 of evolution. " The instances in which accidental deform- 
 ities are not transmitted," says a great biologist, " out- 
 number those in which they are inherited." Did Shake- 
 speare, Caesar, Bismarck, Washington, and thousand such, 
 draw their genius from an ancestry ever growing and 
 straining to the culminating bloom ? Not at all. The 
 imps of determinism have not yet caught all the birds of 
 freedom either with the lime of a whipster's logic or with 
 the net of assumed facts. 
 
 Among the causes tending in the individual to produce 
 slight, oft-repeated, and conscious infringements of moral
 
 306 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 and psychological laws, not a few must be laid to the 
 charge of the biological laws under which we have arisen 
 and exist. The presence of the grinning death's head 
 behind every smile and at all our feasts; the incertainty of 
 the modern mind as to life's continuance, and even as to 
 the goodness at the heart of things ; the stupendous and 
 execrable tricking of every personality by the duperie of 
 sexual passion ; the subtle and inscrutable diseases lurking 
 everywhere to pounce upon us ; the earthquake, storm, 
 cold, and pest bringing palsy to endeavor and ruin to 
 labor ; the hunger and the animal appetites always to 
 satisfy or conquer all these are but indications that life is 
 a warfare, and that our cosmic father has designs and facial 
 lineaments very different from those of Christian benig- 
 nancy. Sunt lacrima rerum. In the struggle of life, the 
 weak, the unlucky for what else can you call many such ? 
 give away mentally or morally, give way under these 
 diabolical teasings or downright thunderbolts of destiny, 
 and man answers nature's inhumanity and brutality and 
 trickery with the same arguments : 6 ^oq adp* ty^ero, the 
 word became flesh ; the criminal and the shattered mind 
 are in these cases the products of nature's inscrutable in- 
 ethicality, children of a strangely cruel parent, which the 
 remaining strong and honest have to care for. And thus 
 burden begins. 
 
 But this part of our burden is a small one in comparison 
 with that chargeable to society's wronging of the individual. 
 It is the oldest, truest of truths : man is man's worst 
 enemy. When one looks out over history, through the 
 long catalogue of bloody and iniquitous centuries ; when 
 one looks among the present nations, with their standing 
 armies of professional killers, their protective tariffs, their 
 monopolistic laws and laissez-faires, their crime-breeding 
 and lunacy-nursing deviltries, one almost feels like the 
 old pessimist, who wished he could go to the moon
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 307 
 
 in order to be able to spit upon the whole human race 
 at one time. 
 
 Now, the moral of all this is that these things, one and 
 several, by the consent of all statisticians, economists, and 
 psychologists, are profound, persistent, and necessary 
 causes of crime and insanity. The maxim of Quetelet, that 
 society prepares crime whilst the criminal only executes it, 
 is of course but a partial truth, but it is a great, a solid, 
 and an unconquerable truth. There is no escape from a 
 social or communal responsibility in the production of law- 
 breaking and mental wreckage. And it is precisely this 
 secret, subtle, haunting sense of guilt in the public con- 
 science that lies at the bottom of the disgusting tendency 
 at which medicine has simpered and ogled, to cry, " Poor 
 fellow, he was crazy; he shouldn't have brained his baby, 
 but he was not responsible. Let's build him a nice big 
 asylum, and feed him, and hire attendants and doctors to 
 wait on him." If he amuse himself knocking the attendants 
 over the head, and tearing their clothes off, the black-eyed 
 attendant must only smile and say, " Poor fellow ! " 
 
 We shall soon illustrate in a large historical way the 
 medieval story of the peasant and his son, who returning 
 one evening past the gibbet noticed that one of the 
 wretches that had been condemned " to die upright in the 
 sun " was wriggling about not dead. In pity they cut him 
 down, resuscitated him, and took him home. He soon 
 proved such a worthless, workless, thieving lout that ' i' 
 the dark o' the moon ' they took him back in disgust, and 
 strung him up again on the gibbet. 
 
 The expert on the witness-stand prostituting the name 
 of medicine and of science to cover some scoundrel with 
 the tear-proof cloak of insanity is a sorry sight indeed. He 
 may be sincere and honest ; if so, our verdict would be 
 that of the Welsh jury : " Not guilty ; but we recommend 
 him not to do it again." It reminds one of what the joker
 
 308 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 said of a glass-eye : Everybody can see through it except 
 the wearer. In considering the subtileness and intricacies 
 of their diagnoses, so well as the contradictoriness of the 
 testimony of rival experts, one thinks of the cannibal chief's 
 reply as to what had become of the missionaries. " Alas !" 
 he said, " they gave us so much good advice, we had to 
 put them to death mercifully." 
 
 In the old days of the childhood of the race the troubled 
 conscience got rid of communal responsibility by heaping 
 its sins metaphorically on a poor little goat or sheep, and 
 shoo-shooing it over a precipice. It was crude ; it was a 
 funny bit of psychological legerdemain ; it was hard on the 
 goat, but it was satisfactory. Modern scape-goat worship 
 is a poor substitute. It also is crude, and it is jugglery, 
 but is unsatisfactory. The future will see through the 
 trick and will find it horribly expensive. The Chinese way 
 is doubtless a little of the opposite extreme, but it doesn't 
 load up the future : they regard insanity not as an extenu- 
 ating but as an aggravating circumstance in connection 
 with crime.* 
 
 There is another reason why the communal conscience 
 and responsibility cannot be downed. Not only do we 
 make bad laws, fail to make good laws, and leave good 
 laws unexecuted, but we are more or less conscious that 
 the community is full of unarrested, unpunished criminals 
 and insane. As every brain and skull, rigidly considered, 
 is atypical to some extent, so every one is guilty of more 
 or less scoundrelism ; we are all a little daft. Often, too, 
 the difference between the criminal behind iron bars and 
 the criminal behind social custom is only a difference of 
 intellect. The first simply got caught. Maudsley well 
 
 * With its 300,000,000 inhabitants China has no asylum for the insane. At 
 the Shanghai hospital, where 22,000 patients are treated annually, there were 
 but eleven cases of insanity among the number.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 309 
 
 says, " There is a sort of tacit conspiracy in the social world 
 to believe itself more virtuous than it is." This also coin- 
 cides with the common impudence that tries to make crime 
 and mental disease the result of ignorance and humble 
 social position, the fact, of course, being the exact reverse. 
 Modern education and modern wealth are at last but a sort 
 of taking down the bars, or a training in jumping, whereby 
 selfishness may get into forbidden clover. The sharp, 
 educated, superrefined urban population would rot in its 
 weakness and corruption if the stupid, honest country lads 
 and lassies did not transfuse their blood and virtue and 
 health into its veins every day. 
 
 To sum the matter up : Is the origin of crime and mental 
 disease to be sought in the individual or in the influence of 
 the environment ? Undoubtedly in both, but it agrees 
 with what evolution teaches as to the origin of faculty, and 
 it corresponds with what we learn by a study of the laws 
 and customs of our modern life, to lay by far the larger 
 burden of responsibility on forces outside and beyond the 
 government of the errant one. In unison with this comes 
 also the thought that toward this view tend the lessons of 
 a true religion and a large kindness. To see how outraged, 
 groping, suffering, and enduring humanity clings to right- 
 ness of conduct and sanity of mind, leads us to the pro- 
 foundest honor and reverence of our kind. 
 
 All of these considerations are of the greatest interest 
 and far-reaching value, so far as concerns the origin and 
 the prophylaxis of crime and insanity; but my contention 
 would be pointless and my logic most lame if I did not at 
 once add, that so soon as the overt act, that is, the proved 
 criminal or mentally incompetent, stands before you, his 
 judge, the whole question of responsibility or irresponsi- 
 bility sinks at once and wholly out of sight. No judge or 
 jury or expert should have anything whatever to do as to 
 the prisoner's responsibility for his act. The whole Gor-
 
 310 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 dian knot is cut at one quick stroke by the staring, evident 
 fact that nothing less than divine omniscience is in the least 
 capable of deciding the question, or of meting out the 
 punishment according to guilt It is a bald, hideous, and 
 stupendous absurdity, this ridiculous assumption either of 
 power or of right on the part of any human being to ex- 
 plore the hidden recesses of the mind, and to decide how 
 far sanity has been driven out, and how far that strange 
 mystery of individuality has sinned against its own light 
 and by its own consent* Every good, modest, and large in- 
 telligence knows this is so and mourns the barbaric shame 
 that keeps the enormity upon our statute books. 
 
 As a necessary corollary you will have foreseen that, in 
 my view, the death penalty should be abolished. Words 
 fail me to express the hideousness of this last relic of 
 savagery in an age of so-called civilization or even of good 
 sense. There is not a single thing that can be said in its 
 favor that is not at once annihilated by a spark of common 
 sense or common justice. Whilst private retaliation and 
 vengeance were allowed, an eye for an eye and a life for a 
 life were excusable ; but in taking away from the wronged 
 man the right to kill his injurer, you have left retaliation 
 and vengeance behind as unworthy and useless examples of 
 barbarism. Lord Bramwell's deterrent theory of punish- 
 ment collapses like a soap-bubble when you probe it with 
 fact or logic. It is on a par with Niemeyer's approval of 
 the dictum of the wife of a Prussian general that whoop- 
 ing-cough is only curable with the rod ; and also Prof. 
 
 * A ridiculous example of this is to be seen in the April, 1889, number of 
 the Journal of Menial Science, where a believer in his own power to penetrate 
 the mystery of mind and crime gets sadly tangled in his own nets. A poor 
 hectored and starving workman, finding the sorry farce of life a bitter tragedy, 
 kills his own beloved baby, rather than permit self and child to continue the 
 bootless struggle. As if " enteric fever " or the " span of his arms " had 
 anything to do with it ! Such " science " is enough to make the angels weep.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 311 
 
 Ruble's recommendation of the shower-bath and birch-rod 
 in certain cases of chronic vomiting. It is said that 
 Quinet's mother used to hire a strapping fellow to come 
 every Saturday and thoroughly thrash all the children, 
 just on general principles! The courts, judges, and experts 
 should act in the same way with the whole human race, for 
 we are certainly all guilty. If the deterrent theory is the 
 right one, then why do we not execute children and the 
 insane ? There is not the least doubt that both children 
 and very many insane love their lives, and are even more 
 keenly alive to the fear of punishment than most criminals, 
 and yet, hang a child, and outraged society would justifi- 
 ably rise in horror and mob sheriff, jury, and judge. In- 
 deed, it may with much truth be urged that the so-called 
 deterrent effect often has a stimulative effect. Dr. Guy 
 tried to show that the execution of a lunatic was always 
 followed by a crop of new murders. Bramwell asserted 
 that many lunatics relied on immunity from punishment 
 for crime on the ground of their own lunacy. Every resi- 
 dent or nurse in an insane asylum will acknowledge that 
 there is more deviltry than insanity about many of their 
 cases, and that if the fist or some equally serviceable but 
 less brutal means could be used in return, much of the 
 combined diablerie and lunacy would disappear. Human- 
 ity, recognizing the incompetency of the deterrent theory, 
 has turned from it with the bungling make-shift and stop- 
 gap of insanity, and at the present rate every villain will 
 soon be excused as a crank.* The mere financial aspect 
 of judicial murder is enough to condemn it. A man com- 
 mits a crime; you spend thousands and hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars to try him (because of your deterrent 
 and punishment-theory it is of infinite importance that no 
 
 * " Society, having manufactured its criminals, has scarcely the right to 
 treat them in an angry spirit of malevolence."
 
 312 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 mistake be made), and then after this you spend thousands 
 more to kill him. But his life is certainly of some financial 
 value. It is worth $14,600 at the age of 21, according to 
 the present average rate of wages and probability of dura- 
 tion of life. You have spent several thousands of dollars 
 to procreate and raise him to manhood ; he is capable of 
 working for you all his life ; you have the right of making 
 him work for you ; and yet you kill him in the most 
 expensive way possible. I call that very lunacy of justice 
 and the most egregious of follies. 
 
 The whole modern idea of punishment is a relic of bar- 
 barism and should be eradicated from jurisprudence, since 
 by its very nature it can neither be just nor prudent. * 
 
 The essence of the English law consists in the statement 
 that " to establish a defense on the groundofinsanity.it must 
 be proved that at the time of committing the act the accused 
 was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of 
 the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act 
 he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know 
 that what he was doing was wrong." 
 
 The essence of my protest consists in this : 
 
 1. No human power in a specific case can decide as to 
 either point, and it is folly to pretend to do so. f 
 
 2. The tendency of both theories is to increase the evil, 
 not limit it. 
 
 3. If we do our first duty, deprive both classes of liberty 
 and of power to reproduce their like, and try to cure them, 
 
 * Lord Justice Frey said that " Punishment is an effort of man to find a 
 more exact relation between sin and suffering." I would say that civilized 
 jurisprudence should have nothing whatever to do or say about sin, suffering, 
 or the relation between the two. 
 
 f It is gratifying to see that a halt is called by the Supreme Court of New 
 York. According to a late decision the expression of an opinion on the part 
 of a physician that a man is insane on any other ground than that he is dan- 
 gerous to himself or others renders the physician liable to a suit for damages.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 313 
 
 it doesn't make a fig's difference which theory is right, be- 
 cause both must then be ignored. The only sensible posi- 
 tion is simply this : when a person either by crime or 
 incapacity to care for himself has forfeited his right to free- 
 dom, then the people must take that freedom away. We 
 have no earthly right to kill in return for crime done. We 
 should reorganize the treatment of criminals and lunatics 
 upon the sole principles of protection of the community and 
 reformation of the law-breaker and mind-breaker, to the 
 utter exclusion of the idea of punishment or of deterring 
 others, the whole upon the most economic basis possible. 
 Protection, reformation, economy ; it is self-evident that 
 these should be the ideals aimed at ; but it is just as indubi- 
 table that present methods, except bunglingly and partially, 
 neither aim at nor secure either, but instead do often seem 
 as if devised to secure the reverse. They certainly do not 
 protect the community in hardly any imaginable way ; they 
 exaggerate and create both crime and lunacy, and no dozen 
 of prize boodler aldermen could have invented a more ex- 
 pensive system of not doing justice and of fleecing the tax- 
 payer. As illustrative of the financial aspect : it is costing 
 Great Britain something like twenty millions of dollars a 
 year to care for her insane, and the amount will rise to thirty 
 millions within ten years. It is simply impossible to esti- 
 mate the bills of the police, the judge, and the jailer in the 
 cause of crime. 
 
 As to social protection, every one knows it is a farce only 
 equaled by the pretense that it does protect. In the recoil 
 from the old heathen judicial murder, and in lacrimose 
 snivel, we adjudge most criminals lunatics, or if we can't do 
 that, we put them in a pandemonium that, with caustic 
 malevolence, we call a penitentiary, and a little later, with 
 full powers of reproducing their like, and with hate, not 
 penitence, in their hearts, we let them slip back into the 
 bosom of the community, by the mysterious fatuity of a 
 27
 
 314 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 discharge from an asylum-superintendent overburdened 
 with his load, or a pardon by a possible political bummer 
 miscalled a Governor. Then if Dean Swift were turned 
 deity he could not have instituted a more sardonically bitter 
 stroke than that now perpetrated by the greatest State of 
 our civilized and Christian America : that of supporting in 
 enforced idleness her malefactors who beg for work, and 
 who from want of it are going mad at the rate of 37 in the 
 past six months. 
 
 If we turn to the idea of reformation a still more remark- 
 able spectacle is offered us. So far as the " penitentiary " 
 is concerned, it is more apt to make everybody else peni- 
 tent than the criminal. Even pretense at reformation has 
 long ago passed into a joke of the chaplain, and if, while 
 working out his sentence, the poor devil of a criminal do not 
 lose the last ray of morality and hopefulness, it is no fault of 
 the system. If, on the other hand, we look for a therapeutic 
 zeal commensurate with the dogmatism of the school that 
 holds mental diseases to be wholly physical, we are astounded 
 to find that cure * and cause are things of little interest. It 
 is no less an authority than Tuke that says f " we seek in 
 vain in our asylums for any evidence ofthe systematic inquiry 
 into the treatment of these conditions. The public thinks 
 that madness can be eliminated by entertainment, and the 
 superintendent is bound to work up to this theory. These 
 great establishments, instead of developing into great 
 hospitals for the cure of disease, have done little more than 
 maintain a high character as model lodging houses for the 
 insane." This indictment is nailed with the fearful charge 
 
 * In 1870 Sir Arthur Mitchell found that out of 1297 patients admitted into 
 Scottish asylums in 1858, 474 died in the asylums, 412 were then alive as 
 chronic lunatics, and 411 had died, or were alive, sane. This is a worse mor- 
 tality than hydrophobia. 
 
 f Nineteenth Century, April, 1889.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 315 
 
 that but one contribution to the pathology or therapeutics 
 of insanity worthy to be called scientific has appeared as an 
 offset or rival to the giant strides of progress in every other 
 department of science and medicine. In fact, what 
 ingenuity could devise a better method of making, exagger- 
 ating, and confirming madness than to huddle hundreds and 
 thousands together suspected or convicted of mental 
 defect ? That this is so, even Tuke admits, and says 
 further: "What every case demands as the primary condi- 
 tion of recovery is separate and individual treatment and 
 consideration." * 
 
 In olden times the pianoforte-tuners used to have an 
 octave in which all the dissonances and discords of the 
 whole keyboard were gathered that they didn't know how 
 to distribute and harmonize. They called this octave " the 
 Devil," and the player, of course, had to avoid it as much 
 as possible, or touch it very gingerly. 
 
 The pith of the whole matter consists in the fact that in 
 our life the sociological tuner cannot confine his " Devil " 
 within the limits of one octave. By dint of an unmorality 
 that is only equaled by the development of sly cunning, 
 the modern intellect has got ahead of the antique conscience 
 and is fast leaving criminal jurisprudence as a curiosity of 
 " ye olden time." That is to say, like the modern piano- 
 tuner, we have, so far as true criminality is concerned, suc- 
 ceeded admirably in distributing " the devil " throughout 
 the whole seven octaves of society. But as regards lunacy, 
 the old plan of the single octave has been rigidly adhered 
 to with the inevitable result that the devil is overrunning 
 his octave and threatening to absorb a big part of the key- 
 board. In 1879 Professor von Krafft-Ebing, the well- 
 known alienist, estimated that in the most civilized peoples 
 
 * Walford says the mortality in public institutions is ten times as great as 
 the general mortality.
 
 316 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 there was one insane person to every 500 of the popula- 
 tion. More recent statistics show the proportion to be 
 more nearly one to every 300 or 400. All statisticians are 
 agreed that the greater the civilization, the higher the ratio 
 of the insane, and that without exception the increase is far 
 higher than that of the population. * In less than a dozen 
 modern nations there are to-day about a million lunatics. 
 While the general population doubles, the number of the 
 insane increases three-fold or four-fold. The number is 
 kept much lower by what may be called the obverse of the 
 medal, the fact of suicide, that is also growing three or 
 four times faster than population. The number of idiots, 
 blind, deaf-mutes, and criminals, is likewise increasing more 
 rapidly than the people who have to support and care for 
 them. We have now probably six or seven, perhaps eight, 
 hundred thousand such folk as one of our burdens in this 
 country. 
 
 In view of the rapidly increasing load, would it not be 
 advisable'to remodel our penal laws and those regulating 
 the treatment of lunatics in some way that shall accomplish 
 the decrease and not the increase of these classes ? Would 
 not this end be sought more rationally by the following 
 means : 
 
 1. The complete eradication from legislation and juris- 
 prudence of all ideas of punishment and of the deterrent 
 effect of the same, sentence to loss of freedom being given 
 upon certain proof either of criminal act or incapacity of 
 self-support or self-control. 
 
 2. The establishment of a nonpolitical, highly paid 
 State Board of Control of the highest Medical, Legal, and 
 
 * In Great Britain the average annual increase of lunatics in asylums has 
 been 1580, and the gross registered increase 45,881. In Paris the number in 
 1872 was one lunatic to 1212 of the population. In 1886 the proportion was 
 one to 1091.
 
 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 317 
 
 Administrative ability, which shall have charge of the com- 
 bined Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent classes, the 
 discharging or pardoning power to reside in this Board 
 alone. 
 
 3. The Treatment of these classes to be organized so 
 far as possible upon an economic basis, but always with the 
 sublime and steady purpose of Cure in view. 
 
 4. The Protection of the Community, and the safe- 
 guarding of the future against the inheritance of criminal 
 and unsound taint, by the euthanasia of idiots, monstrosi- 
 ties, etc., the interdiction of marriage of paupers, and of the 
 physically unsound, and by the asexualization of the law- 
 breaker and the mentally unsound. 
 
 The thoughts underlying this writing might be summar- 
 ized as follows: 
 
 1. The unvarying testimony of statisticians and students 
 of sociology is that the defective, dependent, and delin- 
 quent classes and suicide, as a whole, are, in all civilized na- 
 tions, steadily and continuously increasing much faster than 
 the increase of the communities supporting them ; this 
 shows that something is radically wrong as to the causes 
 and the societies producing these classes ; it is, indeed, a 
 wrong that cannot fail in time to bring society to a very 
 literal reductio ad absurdum, sen ad lunaticum. 
 
 2. Though not wholly, this wrong is found to consist 
 chiefly in the vicious structure of society, economically 
 and morally, in a perniciousness of ideal and custom that 
 can but yield a fruitage of criminality and mental wreckage. 
 
 3. The half-conscious, half-smothered feeling of this 
 communal responsibility, cooperating with the criminal's 
 efforts by legal technicality and by medical aid, has served 
 to the same end by legalizing and excusing crime in the 
 community, or by covering it with the cloak of insanity. 
 
 4. The aid rendered by a certain school of medical 
 writers and experts to this morbid tendency has been based
 
 318 THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN. 
 
 upon the theory that crime and mental disease are simply 
 the effects of criminal or cerebral atypism and brain-dis- 
 ease, and therefore anatomically necessitated. This theory 
 is not only not proved, but is disproved by a number of un- 
 answerable facts and considerations, and is a stultifying 
 argument to use by those whose field of medical study has 
 shown the least progress, and in which therapeutics has 
 hardly entered. 
 
 5. Our legal sentences should be divested of all thought 
 of punishment or of deterrent effects, the asylum and peni- 
 tentiary combined and put under one management, the 
 clinical examination and study of the pathogenesis of these 
 conditions furthered, and all with the sole end of cure and 
 of prophylaxis. 
 
 To hasten the flow of dreary hours a gifted woman once 
 wrote a gruesome tale of how a cunning but short-sighted 
 delver and experimenter in life's mysterious genesis got 
 together many old and foul gatherings from cemetery and 
 from dissection-room, and created a living monster of 
 wonderful growth and power, but without a touch or breath 
 or divinity. Love arid sympathy of a certain kind it 
 indeed sought and hungered for, but the miserable wretch 
 was shunned by all. It soon became conscious of its own 
 moral deformity and hideousness, and in detestation of its 
 own life it came to hate the author of its being. Growing 
 ever more powerful, it restlessly and viciously plotted the 
 injury and ruin of its unfortunate creator.
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS.* 
 
 A PSYCHOLOGIC STUDY. 
 
 I. Prefatory. The design of this paper is to study the 
 nature of consciousness and of its origin, from the facts of 
 sleep and dreams. But although one's own dreams are 
 vague and elusive, those of another person must be par- 
 ticularly so ; it therefore seems necessary to depend mainly 
 upon one's own dreams for data. Hence the apparent 
 egotism of the references to follow. 
 
 The facts supposed to be known are, some of them, as 
 follows : A sensory, afferent, or centripetal nerve is one 
 that conveys an impulse from an outlying or peripheral 
 point toward the spinal cord and brain. In some gang- 
 lionic center it becomes an efferent, centrifugal, or motor 
 impulse, that is conveyed by the appropriate nerve to the 
 muscles of the part first stimulated, and this part is accord- 
 ingly moved or becomes otherwise functional. Stimulus 
 of the nerve leading from the skin, at any point in its 
 course, produces the same motion, and an electrode, thrust 
 into the cortical center, also produces it. But the action of 
 this center is also directed by the consciousness or will ; 
 we can move the foot without its having been hurt. Con- 
 sequently, commissural, or associate fibers, must proceed 
 from the motor center to the organ of consciousness to 
 convey its impulses to this organ, and yet others to convey 
 mandates from consciousness to the motor center. It is 
 the same with every sense-center ; it must have afferent 
 
 * Published in The Open Court of January 24 and 31, 1889. 
 319
 
 320 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 and efferent fibers, uniting it with the higher center of 
 consciousness. These facts necessitate a localization of the 
 organ of consciousness. Such cases as " The American 
 Crowbar Case," and a thousand observations in vivisection 
 and pathology, show that this organ is located in the frontal 
 lobes of the brain. The theory of sleep and dreams now 
 assumed is that in sleep all the subordinate centers of 
 sensation and motion are nonfunctional, neither influencing 
 the activities of the organ of consciousness, nor influenced 
 by it, and that dreaming is the mimic play of the organ of 
 consciousness without the stimulus, the inhibition, or the 
 data material habitually furnished by the subordinate 
 centers. 
 
 II. What Is Sleep ? So long as physiologists have not 
 accurately determined the physiological conditions of sleep, 
 we cannot be dogmatic in our definitions. But whatever 
 else it may be, it is essentially a condition of rest. Our 
 waking life is characterized as a life of action, that is, of the 
 outlay of force. We picture to ourselves the great motor 
 centers of the brain and cord as undoubtedly recouping 
 themselves, even during waking activity, from the great 
 manufactory of force, the digestive and assimilative system ; 
 but it is also necessary to suppose that, during waking, we 
 are, as it were, " running down," trenching closer and 
 closer upon both the store in reserve and the power of 
 ready manufacture, so that a time at last arrives when all 
 expenditure must cease and the process of restorage and 
 restoration must have sole sway. Nervous phenomena are 
 plainly phenomena of the discharge, guidance, and distribu- 
 tion of force. Functional activity everywhere exhausts, 
 and necessitates periods of rest, regeneration, and restorage. 
 It is this dynamic aspect of the question that is certain and 
 suggestive. Sleep may be thus partly defined as the 
 cessation of the functional activities of the sensory and 
 motor centers that habitually consist in the reception or
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 321 
 
 the discharge of force. Organs, whether of motion, sensa- 
 tion, or coordination, are not now pushed into action by 
 the messages of command from the resting or sleeping 
 centers. I am aware that this does not account for the 
 difference that undoubtedly exists between the rest of 
 sleep and that of waking. There is, of course, some 
 mystery here, though I do not believe it a profound one. 
 When awake, whether resting or the origin of muscular 
 contractions, a motor center is probably the source of 
 continuous discharge. All muscles have tone, many are 
 required to be persistently innervated, and any or all may 
 instantly require power. But in sleep the function of 
 regeneration of nerve-force predominates over the discharg- 
 ing function. One organ cannot at the same moment 
 perform two totally different acts or functions equally well, 
 and hence one must be paramount. Now, unless discharg- 
 ing, a center cannot affect either muscles or consciousness. 
 If it do not affect muscles, it rests. If in addition it do 
 not affect consciousness, it sleeps. When, in all motor 
 and sensory centers the regeneration or restorage function 
 predominates over the discharging function, and when, 
 therefore, the organ of consciousness receives from them 
 no discharges, we have the general condition of sleep. 
 Permanent predominant discharging constitutes the waking 
 condition of centers, single or general ; permanent pre- 
 dominant regeneration of nerve-force constitutes sleep. In 
 this, as in many other respects, it is highly interesting to 
 find, as has lately been done,* that the renal secretion of 
 the sleeping-hours is distinctly stimulant and convulsivant, 
 while that of the waking-hours is soporific and narcotic. 
 We thus see that by some not-understood method nature 
 eliminates during wakefulness the material of the blood 
 that would, if kept in it, dull the keen edge of action, 
 
 * Lefons sur les auto-intoxicants dans les maladies. Par Ch. Bouchard. 
 28
 
 322 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 whilst, on the other hand, there is during sleep, strained 
 out of it, material that would spur the centers into wakeful 
 activity. This fact is very suggestive.* 
 
 III. What Is Consciousness? A simple reflex act is 
 one that proceeds from a single stimulus without the impli- 
 cation of other possibly-related centers. The subsidiary 
 center intermediating the motor response is sufficient to 
 effect the objects of the act. If the act is more than reflex, 
 if more than one center has to intermediate the complex 
 act, the impulse must proceed from a higher coordinating 
 focus that uses the subordinate centers as its media or 
 instruments. The center of a simple reflex act may be 
 called presentative, that or those of others placed over 
 them, representative. Consciousness may tentatively be 
 considered as the single and highest coordinating focus 
 of all the representative centers, or the unique rerepre- 
 sentative one. Hither proceed the centripetal lines of 
 stimuli from all points of the periphery. But a moment's 
 consideration shows us it is not only a focus, and one 
 exercising a rerepresentative function alone. The primary 
 object of all stimulation is reaction; hence, like all its sub- 
 ordinates, it is also, and in fact largely, directional, execu- 
 tive, governmental. In sleep the subordinate or repre- 
 sentative centers are not functional, no peripheral stimulus 
 reaches it, and it issues no orders to underlying centers of 
 motion. 
 
 IV. Does Consciousness Sleep? Sometimes we have 
 dreams in sleeping, sometimes we do not. Strict exami- 
 nation of our waking consciousness shows it is not a matter 
 of memory ; we do not dream all the time when asleep ; 
 
 * It is also curious to find the popular belief that relatively more births 
 occur in the small hours of the night is scientifically true. See Dr. Swayne in 
 Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal, September, 1888. One wonders whether 
 the common belief that more deaths occur in these hours is also true.
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 323 
 
 we sometimes forget our dreams. Upon waking, we 
 sometimes clearly remember our dreams, at other times 
 our memory is confused ; or, again, we are only certain 
 that we have dreamed, but without a trace of what it is we 
 dreamed ; and, lastly, we are often perfectly sure we had no 
 dreams. Moreover, as all vital functions must have their 
 rhythmical periods of rest, even the heart and lungs being 
 no exception, so the organ of consciousness must sleep. 
 In this fact lies the explanation of what must be considered 
 the pathologic character of the consciousness of a vivid 
 and continuous dreamer. An organ of consciousness, if 
 kept by its own hyperesthesia, or by the fevers and abnor- 
 malities of its subordinate centers, or by the unremitting 
 bombardment of multiform sense-stimulation, in a condi- 
 tion of unrest, must exercise an irregular and poor waking 
 control of the body. If the general never slept, his army 
 would soon sleep the sleep of the vanquished. Forced 
 wakefulness was the most horrible of ancient tortures. The 
 physician well knows that his prognosis often depends upon 
 the effect of his hypnotic. 
 
 V. The Difference Between the Dreaming and the 
 Waking Consciousness. The waking consciousness, as 
 we have seen, is the highest unifying center of the whole 
 organism. It is the focus wherein memories of all past 
 experiences are correlated with all present stimuli or 
 motives, and whence the command is given that is best to 
 subserve the preservation of the organism. The dreaming 
 consciousness,* in the first place, is evidently deprived of 
 the great body of present incitants to action ; all stimuli 
 are wanting, all subordinate centers are functionless. 
 
 * Unless specified, and especially now, I mean by the dreaming conscious- 
 ness, the placidly, reflectively, dreaming one, not that peculiar one in which 
 the suffering, struggling consciousness is vehemently endeavoring to arouse 
 subordinate centers, a condition strangely called " nightmare."
 
 324 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 What material has it to work upon ? From what data 
 must it now proceed ? Plainly, those of memory only. 
 But in dreams it is a striking fact that remembered things 
 are not orderly, they do not correspond to reality, but are 
 fantastic and untrustworthy. Why, then, does the waking 
 and sleeping memory differ in such a highly important 
 matter as correspondence with reality ? Evidently because 
 in sleep the control of reality is not present ; because 
 memory is a function of subordinate centers as well as of 
 consciousness. No more satisfactory conception of mem- 
 ory can be given than that its physical basis consists 
 in a faint reproduction of the same ganglionic discharges 
 that took place in full force at the time of the origi- 
 nal sensation or action. If, therefore, the subordinate 
 sensori-motor centers are not discharging toward the 
 consciousness-center, all that is left in this center is the 
 memory of a memory, and, in fact, such a designation alone 
 conveys a conception of the unreal and ghost-like nature 
 of the memory of the dreaming consciousness. This cen- 
 ter in dreaming acts weakly and faintly in the same way 
 that it formerly acted strongly when fed by the full forces 
 of its waking subordinates. But in sleeping it remains 
 without the control of reality, which is always logical or 
 obedient to the law of causality ; and hence, in so acting, 
 it must be illogic and fantastic. 
 
 VI. Origin and Nature of the Waking Consciousness. 
 The organ of consciousness is single, specialized, and 
 localized. Dreams show us that while the habitual sensori- 
 motor functions and all stimuli are absent, consciousness 
 may be intensely active. Its essential functions are pre- 
 served in sleep, and this, were it a cerebrally diffused organ, 
 would be impossible. From of old consciousness has been 
 compared to the constriction of an hour-glass through 
 which the sand must pass grain by grain. But one train 
 of ideas can occupy consciousness at one time, and it is
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 325 
 
 always a train, a line, a succession of single stimuli, to 
 which it reacts. This is equivalent to saying that it reacts 
 to the strongest stimulus presented at any one instant. 
 This is its simple form, best illustrated in the conscious- 
 ness of the dog, where it is always and, as it were, mechani- 
 cally responsive to the presented object. However 
 obedient and engrossed by a duty or demand upon its 
 attention, let there suddenly appear another stimulus, 
 another dog, a physiological need, etc., and previous ob- 
 jects of attention are, as it were, annihilated in the total 
 engrossment of consciousness with the new object. It is 
 the same with almost all animals. Remembrance of past 
 danger in all hunted animals keeps consciousness keenly 
 alert to the signs of danger, so that the appearance, even 
 the thought, of such signs at once floods the organ of 
 consciousness with powerful stimuli, to the exclusion of 
 all others. Indeed, it does not seem absurd to suspect 
 that the escape from danger has been the strongest factor 
 in the development of consciousness. It would certainly 
 emphasize the quality or ability of differentiating self as the 
 object of consciousness, and setting it clearly forth as the 
 chief object of solicitude. An animal rises in the scale of 
 intelligence just in proportion as it is capable of preserving 
 clear memories of past experiences, individual or racial, 
 and of fusing these with the present stimulus so that the 
 resultant action shall most successfully secure the preser- 
 vation of himself and his species. The essence of the 
 matter consists in this fusing process, and the conscious- 
 ness of man differs in no essential characteristic from that 
 of animals except that, at the instant of fusing, a wider 
 sweep of possible results, a more reflective weighing of 
 more diverse experiences and complex motives, enters into 
 the count. Extension of the weighing time, complexity 
 of the pondered objects, and delicacy of the balancing 
 mechanism these are but differing degrees of the same
 
 326 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 powers that belong to both alike. The first to be evolved 
 must have been the extension of the weighing time. The 
 mechanical jumping from one presented object to another 
 with unpondering rapidity is naive but primitive. That 
 the serpent in all antiquity has been worshiped as the 
 wisest of animals, may have been because we catch in the 
 restrained glitter of his eye the ability to ponder conflicting 
 motives and stimuli longer than others. Action does not 
 follow stimulus with the celerity of a mechanical force. In 
 the struggle for existence, that animal would rise above 
 his mates which, other things being equal, could at will 
 prolong the time between the reception of competing 
 stimuli and the resulting action. With this ability would 
 go, pan passu, the ability to handle more varied stimuli and 
 motives. Delicacy of equilibration of multiform forces 
 held long in suspense is only possible to the highest 
 human consciousness and is its superb characteristic.* 
 Thus, to hold in suspense many competing stimuli, and 
 weigh them accurately, would require a large and com- 
 plexly organized center such as the frontal lobes, whose 
 human development has been exactly proportional to the 
 growth of intelligence. After a period of imaginative 
 excitement or creative intellectual work I have a sense of 
 constriction and tension in the frontal lobes, and especially 
 of the right side.f 
 
 * Discriminative attention is a human faculty, and appears to be either a 
 selective receptivity of the organ of consciousness, an exclusive reception by 
 it of one kind of stimulus, or the exclusive direction of its innervation upon a 
 single or a special set of subordinate motor centers. 
 
 f Still another indication is the fact, daily observed by ever)' physician, that 
 eye-strain is a frequent and persistent cause of frontal headaches. It may be 
 worth noting that, like the center of articulate speech, the organ of conscious- 
 ness must, by its very nature, be a single organ. Bilateral symmetry is the law 
 in most other functions of the body and its nervous mechanism. Speaking 
 evolutionally, articulate speech is an accidental after- thought, and so must be
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 327 
 
 VII. Origin and Nature of the Dreaming Conscious- 
 ness. It is of the very nature of the waking conscious- 
 ness that it must always be responsive to some stimulus ; 
 that it must be equally responsive to either of the many 
 and varied possible stimuli ; and, lastly, that it must re- 
 spond to a stimulus of low intensity, however delicate it 
 may be. It is this delicacy of action that I wish to empha- 
 size. Irritation at extreme or unnecessary noises ; esthetic 
 pain at crude and loud colors ; sensitiveness to differences 
 of stimulus of any kind, these distinguish the highly organ- 
 ized personality. There is no bolometer or other instrument 
 of precision delicate enough to measure the inconceivable 
 minuteness of the force that is sufficient to influence con- 
 sciousness. This quality proves of profound service in 
 sleep. When the animal or man lies down to sleep, I think 
 that, at first, consciousness also sleeps, since to some extent it 
 also must yield obedience to the general law of the rhythm 
 and rest. When sleep is permitted, it is because it is safe 
 to permit it. Hence sleep may at first be dreamless with 
 less danger to the organism. But, since the struggle for 
 existence began, the sleeper has needed a sentinel to stand 
 watch over him, and be on the alert for any one of his 
 thousand enemies. When one thinks of the manifold agen- 
 cies of harm, such as fire, robbers, impure air, malposition 
 of the body, too great heat or cold, physiologic needs or 
 pathologic conditions, etc., etc., to which the best pro- 
 located upon one side or the other of the two-sided brain. Upon -which side 
 is not only not invariable, but it is even found to follow or cause ? the educa- 
 tion of the opposite hand for intellectual work. In a recent very interesting 
 case the speech-center was proved to be localized upon the left side, because, 
 though the man was left-handed for everything else, the one intellectual act of 
 writing was done with the right hand. Arguing from analogy, it might be 
 supposed that the organ of consciousness for right-handed people would be 
 found in the left frontal lobe, since the right hand is the one most generally 
 used for intellectual things, as writing, gesturing, etc. There are other con- 
 siderations that would argue the reverse.
 
 328 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 tected and most civilized people are liable, and how inse- 
 curely most of us sleep, and when we add to all these all 
 the dangers and enemies and perplexities of the savage or 
 the higher animals, we can then vividly realize how neces- 
 sary such a sentinel is for the preservation of the organism 
 and the species. That the period of the exhaustion of 
 consciousness is more brief, that its resumption of function 
 would be more speedy, than with other organs, goes with- 
 out saying, and especially since its function is mainly equi- 
 librational, directional, mirror-like, rerepresentative, not 
 creative, remolding, motor, or representative. I am cer- 
 tain that my dreams grow more vivid toward the time of 
 awaking, just as I have no dreams in the first hours of sleep. 
 My own dreams also show plainly the sentry-like function 
 of the dreaming consciousness. I am very sensitive to 
 malposition of the body in sleep. Pressure upon a nerve- 
 trunk is with me extremely prone to produce the phenom- 
 enon popularly known as " sleep " of a limb. For this 
 reason I sleep upon a hard bed, and I can sleep in but one 
 position, upon my back, without pillow and without flexion 
 of any limb. If by accident these conditions are broken 
 during sleep, I have as a result a peculiar experience that 
 has happened to me repeatedly and all through my life. 
 My dream at first takes on a tinge of impending danger 
 until I become aware that I must awaken myself. The 
 labor of doing this is both powerful and painful. I am 
 truly conscious of my effort, of a struggle with my dormant 
 members. The energy spent in endeavoring to arouse my- 
 self is tremendous. At first I can perhaps move but one 
 finger, then I can bring other fingers into the control of the 
 will, finally the alternate flexions and extensions include 
 the hand, and I may have to wave and thrash the hand and 
 arm for some time before arousing a sufficient overflow of 
 stimulus to reach other motor centers and spur into the 
 condition of " awake " all the sensory and motor centers of
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 329 
 
 the body. Sometimes the head is the movable part, and this 
 is rotated from side to side with ever-increasing extent and 
 quickness, until the general arousing is attained. All this 
 is to me an indication of the sentinel function of conscious- 
 ness during sleep, of its quick response to slight stimuli, of 
 its directional control of subordinate and representative 
 centers directly intermediating muscular action. It also 
 shows that it is executive only through its agents. Its mo- 
 tor-commissural fibers must end in the direct motor-centers 
 about the fissure of Rolando. But it also implies that its 
 sensory fibers are, in part, direct, and warrants our belief 
 that the great bundles of centripetal fibers proceeding from 
 the periphery split, and whilst the greater number proceed 
 to the direct sensorimotor or representative centers about 
 the Rolandic fissure, a limited number proceed directly to 
 the organ of consciousness. Such an anatomic arrange- 
 ment would explain the sentry-like function. It would thus 
 become clear why a peripheral stimulus, as a malposition 
 of the body, could arouse the light-sleeping organ of con- 
 sciousness, which, in turn, could arouse the representative 
 or direct motor Rolandic centers. As will be noticed, the 
 dynamic aspect of the question is always decisive, since the 
 control of subordinate centers is only at first of the small- 
 est or most easily moved muscles, such as the fingers, a 
 hand, or the head placed in unstable equilibrium. And not 
 only this, I have often had the sense of weight and dis- 
 comfort of a limb before I had succeeded in awakening the 
 center that controlled that limb. The argument for direct 
 sensory fibers to the organ of consciousness is still further 
 strengthened by the frequent phenomenon of my sleep that 
 follows: Upon being aroused by a very sudden noise I 
 have often clearly recognized the fact that I hear the sound 
 with my consciousness, if I may be pardoned the seeming 
 absurdity, before I do with the auditory center. The vibra- 
 tory impact arouses consciousness a moment before it
 
 330 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 arouses audition. The safe-guarding function of conscious- 
 ness in sleep is thus again exemplified. In Science, 
 November 2d, a correspondent describes an interesting phe- 
 nomenon of his dream that also throws light upon this as- 
 pect of the question. The strokes of a wood-chopper were, 
 in the early part of the dream, irregular and without order. 
 They then became rhythmical for four strokes, and then the 
 sleeper awoke to find the clock striking midnight. After 
 awaking he counted four beats, and thus he knew that the 
 clock-strokes brought into the dream their rhythm at about 
 the fifth stroke, and made the axe-strokes coincide with the 
 clock-strokes. In other words, the sound and its rhythm 
 reached consciousness directly, impressing upon it their 
 own peculiarities, which persisted for a time until the 
 stronger stimulation of the auditory center aroused all the 
 mind into " awakedness." * Finally, there is one other 
 curious illustration of the question that also shows the del- 
 icacy and the independence or the action of the sleeping 
 consciousness. I allude to the ability possessed by some 
 
 * In a late dream my fancy took on a musical remembrance or coloring, and 
 the same may have been aroused by the miaulings of a cat below the window. 
 Before awaking, the music of the dream was consonant with that of Thomas, 
 and was exceedingly grateful and musical. When the caterwauling became 
 loud enough to awaken me, the pleasure of the dream was suddenly changed 
 into disgust at the unmusical noise of the cat, that an instant previously had 
 been one of delight. In this it is also possible to suppose the stimulation 
 of consciDusness was from and through the auditory center, but that too faint 
 or imperfectly worked-up material was furnished. It seems more probable that 
 the stimulation was directly from the external sense-organ without the inter- 
 mediation of the sound-center. Just as fibers proceed from the cochlea to the 
 cortical auditory center, where neural vibrations become sound, so it would 
 seem that other fibers proceed from the cochlea to the consciousness center 
 intermediating its direct stimulation. If, in my dream, consciousness had been 
 fed from the auditory or musical center, it could hardly have mistaken the cat's 
 misery for music. The same may be said as regards my dream of being in- 
 tensely " tickled " by a hand beneath the chin to awake with the thought that 
 my neck is not the least " ticklish."
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 331 
 
 people of, as it were, winding up the alarum of their men- 
 tal mechanism so that they shall awake at a given hour. I 
 have known people that sleep soundly and awake habitu- 
 ally within a few minutes of the time they had, upon going 
 to sleep, determined to awaken themselves. My own at- 
 tempts to do this always result in lying awake the most of 
 the night. My alarum goes off at a soupgon, entirely too 
 soon, and keeps on rattling at a great rate ! 
 
 Hypnotism, it may parenthentically be remarked, would 
 seem to be the reverse of the dream-state. In the latter 
 there is no centripetal stimulus, the subordinate motor 
 centers being quiescent. In the hypnotic state the senses 
 are alert, the sensori-motor centers actively functional, but 
 the center of consciousness is resleep, or, what is the same 
 thing, supplanted or enslaved. How this can be done is a 
 mystery. However well attested, one is inclined to think 
 it impossible, and that it does not happen, except in the 
 natural way, that a pliant, weak mind finds satisfaction in 
 acting a role, called the hypnotic state. 
 
 VIII. Insomnia. In passing we may note the influ- 
 ence of the kind of waking life upon the dreaming conscious- 
 ness. Work, especially physical work, but even normal 
 mental work, is usually followed by refreshing and com- 
 paratively dreamless sleep. Worry, solicitude, and vexa- 
 tion, bring troubled dreams and even pronounced insomnia. 
 Why is this ? In normal exhaustion of the nervous centers 
 there is no conflict or unwonted excitation of the center 
 of consciousness. There is a low reserve, and investment 
 or action must cease until interest or income accrues. In 
 long-continued anxiety, however, consciousness is stormed 
 by a multitude of conflicting and continuous stimuli, lead- 
 ing to no definite resolve and action, and hence ending in 
 a surcharge of energies, probably a real hyperemia and 
 febrile excitation of the organ, that do not cease at night
 
 332 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 or with sleep. I do not doubt that the frontal lobes of a 
 man dying, finally worn out with years of care and dis- 
 appointment, would, under the microscope, show a different 
 condition from those of a healthy and happy man. On the 
 other hand, if hyperesthesia is pathologic, anesthesia is cer- 
 tainly indicative of a poor type of consciousness. That must 
 be a vegetative sort of consciousness that sleeps as soundly 
 and as long as the lower centers. No nimble-witted man 
 can fail to be a dreamer. My friend must be a dreamer of 
 interesting dreams ! One that does not dream is not ex- 
 ceptionally sympathetic, responsive, alert; he has not 
 highly keen sensibilities, is not nobly religious, or chari- 
 table, or aspiring. 
 
 I have always been subject to insomnia of the following 
 kind, I am likely to have periods of paroxysmal, emotional, 
 and imaginative excitement : If I am pursuing an object of 
 study, trying to solve some scientific or practical problem, 
 or if greatly interested in some work of art, etc., I habitually 
 awake in the night after a short sleep, and at once the 
 whole machinery of intellect, imagination, and conscious- 
 ness is in full cry ! The heart is aroused, and by the spur 
 of excitement is put into the field at full speed. It is clear 
 that this organ of consciousness requires the best of blood, 
 and a deal of it ! All this would appear to be the overflow 
 of nerve-force from the center of consciousness along the 
 centrifugal lines of its habitual discharge to the subordinate 
 centers that are thus kept in a state of activity though 
 really needing rest. All the devices for wooing sleep are 
 but tricks to prevent the outflow. None of the methods 
 commonly employed help me, and they appear to be based 
 upon a false principle. They generally consist in a repeti- 
 tion of the same discharges, or an exercise of the same 
 subordinate centers. However often we count or repeat 
 the letters of the alphabet, or in thought walk up and
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 333 
 
 down the same path, the mimic and weak outflow is by the 
 same commissural fibers to the same subordinate centers. 
 If I am ever able to succeed by any device at all, it is by 
 deflecting, derouting, and subdividing the outflow in such 
 a way that it does not flood any single subordinate center. 
 No single train or repetition of thought is allowed, the 
 stream is divided so that each subsidiary center gets such 
 a minimum of excitation that it can resist it, and thus all 
 are calmed. For example, I think, for a passing moment, 
 of each part of my body in succession, and of each function 
 of the same, of each sense, with the origin, course, and 
 result of each sensation. Thus traversing the round, I, as 
 I believe, drain off and subdivide the superabundance of 
 innervation to every possible outlet. Instead of persistently 
 doing something, or constantly exercising motor-centers 
 exclusively, it is better to trust to a mimic sensational ex- 
 ercise. Thoughts of personal motion are outgoing and 
 stimulating, thoughts of visual and auditory sensations are 
 receptive and calming. Another device I have success- 
 fully used is to imagine myself in midocean, becalmed, 
 alone, not frightened, and looking out over a monochro- 
 matic ocean to all points of the compass successively, 
 thinking of all the strange life in the depths below me 
 whose bottom leads on and on to distant isles, watching 
 also the starlit space above, as it pales into magical sun- 
 rises, and the ever-changing phantasmagoria of cloudland 
 flows ceaselessly by. 
 
 IX. General Characteristics of Dreams. Most of my 
 dreams are of actions. I do things, or try to do them, or 
 am the object of the acts of others. Very few are con- 
 templative, intellectual, or purely sensational. This shows 
 that the mimic stage of dreamland, in a general way, is the 
 same as that of the waking life. Consciousness is most 
 habitually employed in the direction of the activities of the
 
 334 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 motor centers.* Historic man, even more than at present, 
 has been an active, not a contemplative, reflective, or recep- 
 tive being. The mimic exercise of motor function by the 
 dreaming consciousness produces for me two types of 
 dreams : First, the clogged, heavy, and impeded, in which 
 the feet are stuck fast or weigh a thousand pounds, etc. I 
 think this is a familiar sort of dream, and finds its rationale 
 in the resisted efforts of the organ of consciousness to 
 arouse the subordinate sleeping centers of motion. In the 
 dream we do not know why we cannot lift the feet, or reach 
 the succoring hand ; we are only intensely conscious that 
 the foot or hand are sluggish and benumbed as in truth 
 they are. Consciousness sends its mandate to the Rolandic 
 centers, but there is no response. Hence the genesis of 
 the so-called "nightmare." Resisted and unresponsive 
 effort arouses fear and further effort. Bodily malposition 
 may also serve to beget the endeavor to arouse subordinate 
 motor centers. A correlated fact may be bracketed here. 
 A familiar dream-experience consists in dropping or step- 
 ping off some high place, or falling through the air, and 
 with the drop, or the crash, we awake in fright. If our 
 conception of cerebral action is correct, this would find its 
 explanation in the loss of the habitual checks and control 
 of the lower sense-centers. When awake, consciousness 
 exercises control of the muscles and saves the body from 
 falling. When asleep, the command is also given, but the 
 lower centers and their muscles do not obey and we fall. 
 
 * A dreaming dog presents a suggestive picture: The paws jerk, the lids 
 quiver, the jaws snap, he barks little, short, spasmodic barks, or he growls and 
 whines. I picture the consciousness-center intensely active, the chase in his 
 dream is wild. The subordinate centers are partially aroused by the overflow 
 from the higher center, but not normally functional until such a pitch of ex- 
 citement is reached that, in the culmination of the dream, all and several are 
 " awakened."
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 335 
 
 Not only this, but the danger of falling, the predicament 
 we are in, is aroused by the fact that the inhibition and 
 checks of sense-control do not exist in sleep to keep us 
 away from heights and dangerous places. Consciousness 
 records the efforts of will we make, as if they were registered 
 in action, and it sees no difference between willed act and 
 motor fact. 
 
 The second class of movement-dreams, or action-dreams, 
 is the reverse of the first, and consists in movements not only 
 unencumbered, but of transcendent ease. The glorious 
 pleasure of supernatural power and action is indescribable. 
 I often awake quivering with the intense pleasure of free, 
 swift, and confident activity. Sometimes it is a sort of 
 skating or gliding across countless miles of country or 
 ocean ; sometimes it is a giant-like striding from mountain- 
 top to top ; sometimes the perfect eagle swoop through the 
 blue of space, effortless and superb ! May this be thought 
 of as either a normaLplay of the organ of consciousness 
 with its own forces, or as a healthy mimic outflow of inner- 
 vation along the usual routes to the subordinate centers of 
 motion, which, in comparative exhaustion, absorb the in- 
 flow without themselves being aroused to an active outflow 
 of innervation ? 
 
 It has been a source of wonder that in the classical 
 hashish dream of the De Quincey type an eternity of 
 time is compressed into a moment, and to the rioting con- 
 sciousness that moment is indistinguishable from the actual 
 detailed facts of a thousand years. In the same way, space 
 broadens, and the body itself, or the room it dwells in, 
 becomes wide as the starlit night. Personality may even 
 seem to double, and thus again enlarge the boundaries and 
 possibilities of experience. Is not all this also a corollary 
 of the anatomic and physiologic conditions of the organ 
 of consciousness ? We have memories of waking life only 
 as things and events transpire that memory records : but
 
 336 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 the evolution of a tree, or a world, or a life, is a slow pro- 
 cess. But, to the mind, in the condensation of thought, it 
 becomes an instantaneous thing. We can think the evolu- 
 tion of a solar system in the flash of an instant. It is fact 
 that draws this out to ages. In sleep, let us again repeat, 
 facts and all their qualities are lost in the loss of the lower 
 centers of sensation and motion. Hence the mental review 
 of time-stretches and the multitudinously-linked chain of 
 facts becomes temporarily as much of a reality to the 
 dreaming consciousness as if the law of causality were truly 
 operative. It does not suspect that its phantasmagoria is 
 not real, because, so far as itself is concerned, it is real. 
 We must remember that consciousness is never directly 
 touched by reality. It only receives the echoes and repre- 
 sentatives of reality. In the hashish-dream it is not sus- 
 pected that the thousand years are not actually passing. 
 It is only when we awake and compare the dream with the 
 slow and droning march of casually-linked things that we 
 recognize that the thousand years were condensed by the 
 wizard of consciousness. Memory is in truth only the 
 memory of psychic happenings, and as these, essentially, 
 are almost, if not absolutely, timeless and spaceless, it fol- 
 lows that the passage of a cycle of material events may be 
 swept through the hour-glass constriction of consciousness 
 in a brief moment. Or again, we may in dreams wish or 
 will to do a thousand things in a flooding instant of bound- 
 less desire, that a world and an eternity could not realize 
 under the conditions of causality. But it is apparent that 
 to the dreaming consciousness this crowded rush of desires 
 and willings is as real, apparently as subject to time and 
 its laws, as if the lower centers were not asleep. It is these 
 lower centers that give to it the term of comparison and 
 enslave it in the treadmill of reality. In sleep the noble 
 slave is temporarily set free ; sleep seals the eye-lids of its 
 masters, the spirit rises out of the chains that bind con-
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 337 
 
 sciousness to reality, and the divine slave at once comes 
 into possession of the universe as its absolute plaything, 
 whilst over its fancy hovers the superb child's hallucination 
 that the paltry nothings of its imagination are real suns 
 and stars and worlds, the actual march of cosmic events 
 and the pomps of eternal time ! Its mimic play and light- 
 est wishes instantaneously become incontrovertible and 
 unquestioned facts. Had they reasoned of the world of 
 dreamland, those philosophers that resolved the world, 
 with its laws of time and space and causality, into mentality, 
 would have been wiser than they were. 
 
 A pronounced characteristic of all dreams is their great 
 lack of logical correspondence with the laws of the real 
 world. In dreaming this is not recognized. The most 
 intolerable absurdity seems perfectly natural. One face 
 or person fades into another, we take hundred-mile steps, 
 we do things outrageously mal-a-propos, without a sus- 
 picion of their incongruity. I gather from this that the 
 waking activity of the organ of consciousness is regulated 
 and governed by the multiform stimuli of the subordinate 
 centers. In a certain sense and in the light of evolution, 
 the organ of consciousness is an outgrowth and product 
 of these subordinates. In the waking life their messages 
 must continually be sent to the higher unifying center. 
 The product of their combined influence must be inhibitory 
 and regulative. In this way there is produced the sanity, 
 the correspondence with reality, that marks the orderly, 
 mirror-like function of our waking consciousness. The 
 essential characteristic of sleep is the nonactivity of the 
 subordinates, and hence the unregulated and fantastic 
 mimic life of the organ, acting without data or content. 
 The restraining checks and the completing fullness of the 
 influences of the lower centers are removed, and hence the 
 inevitable result is inconsequentiality, illogicality. Another 
 reason for this fantasticalness lies in the fact that even in 
 29
 
 338 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 waking the work of consciousness consists in no exclusive 
 occupation with one set of stimuli. Strictly speaking, there 
 is no habit of consciousness. It must remain at the instant 
 service of any or many orders and kinds of control, whether 
 of sensation, memory, or various motive. When removed 
 from the inhibition and control of reality, consciousness 
 could not be supposed to show an order and logicality of 
 succession it had never had in real life. 
 
 Depriving it also of content or material would all the 
 more emphasize its whimsicality. In dreams the sense of 
 the incongruous or the ludicrous is with me of the extrem- 
 est rarity. The humorous is the incongruous, and this is 
 a failure of correspondence with the real. If the compari- 
 son with reality be excluded, then, though every dream be 
 incongruity itself, recognition of the fact by the dreaming 
 consciousness is infallibly excluded. I have sometimes 
 been awakened by my own laughter at .some apparently 
 highly absurd thing, but when awake I have been just as 
 much disgusted at myself to find the plainly-remembered 
 dream in reality contained no vestige of the humorous. 
 
 X. Differences Between the Dreaming and the "Wak- 
 ing Consciousness. I preserve in my dreams most of my 
 stronger esthetic, deeper moral, and passionate feelings or 
 emotions, but with noteworthy differences. These differ- 
 ences may perhaps be summed up by saying that in dream- 
 land the factitious elements and refinements of a super- 
 posed civilization fall away, leaving in relief the nude 
 realism of primitive and disingenuous personality. For 
 example, the occasional prevalence of generative instincts 
 might alone convert one to the doctrine of biology covered 
 by the adage, omne vivum ex ovo. Assuredly, restraint and 
 scruples concerning such matters are not known in dream- 
 land. The chastest do not blush there. I rarely have any 
 care for clothes or nudity there, and the bizarrerie of my 
 dream-plights in this respect often amuses my waking con-
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 339 
 
 sciousness. In one way I think it remarkably confirmative 
 of my general thought that, as the savageness of the brute 
 and the selfishness of the animal come out in intoxication, 
 it is not so in dreamland. Rage, destructiveness, tyranny, 
 delight in power these are almost never present. The 
 reason is that the power-producing or motor-centers are 
 asleep. Neither is hypocrisy known in dreamland. False- 
 hood is largely a product of civilization. There are few of 
 us that are not forced into subterfuge, peccadillo, and even 
 cowardly lies, by the conventionalities and disguised war- 
 fare of civilized life. Consciousness is in truth ethical and 
 unselfish : it holds the balance between the selfish greeds 
 of the lower centers. In sleep these last are forced to stop 
 their wranglings and their competition for place and recog- 
 nition, and it therefore never occurs to dream-conscious- 
 ness to lie or deceive for selfish reasons. Morally, dream- 
 land is a brighter country than our noisier world. If 
 dreams tell us anything about our essential personality, 
 they argue against our innate depravity. I think I am 
 more kind and careful of others' rights in dreamland than 
 in awakeland. In the last country I have to endure many 
 grievous hurtings of my feelings in the matter of cruelty 
 to animals. In dreamland my indignation at it is constantly 
 aroused. I may see nothing absurd in a fireman compel- 
 ling his beautiful horse to pull the fire-engine by a three- 
 tined fork thrust through the animal's nose, but I awake, 
 boiling with rage and vowing to arouse society to a recog- 
 nition of the shame of it all. Unless feelings of profound 
 pity, contempt, indignation, etc., are aroused, I find that in 
 dreamland I am, not immoral, but unmoral. Unless a lie 
 hurts somebody in a way to arouse fervidness of feeling, I 
 do not greatly hate the lie or the liar. But if the lie pro- 
 duce injustice or wrong, I hate that, and the author of it, 
 though not because of the falsehood. 
 
 In my dreams I have even killed others with utterly no
 
 340 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 compunction or regret, but with satisfaction that I had 
 righted some wrong, or vindicated somebody, or succored 
 the weak. I remark always the most unquestioned and 
 enthusiastic acceptance of the fundamental passions of pity, 
 love, justice, indignation at wrong, etc. These great 
 forces of mental life have stamped their impress so deeply 
 into the structure of the organ of consciousness that, even 
 when the stimulus of the fact is absent, when the subor- 
 dinate centers are hushed in sleep, and sensation is non- 
 existent, there still remains the play of nervous activity 
 along the old lines, and with sufficient intensity to light up 
 again the emotions that once blazed forth at the touch of 
 the real. 
 
 As to the reasoning power, I find my dream-conscious- 
 ness wholly devoid of it. I have heard of mathematicians 
 working out incomplete problems in their sleep, or the key 
 to some scientific mystery or financial vexation reaching 
 one at that time. To say the least, such cases must be very 
 exceptional. Judgment, weighing complex probabilities, 
 induction by close lines of logic from manifold details to a 
 single cause or principle, all this presupposes a converg- 
 ence of myriad nerve-currents of many and disassociated 
 points, the focalization of many sensations, memories, 
 past and present, etc., etc. To think is to ponder, and 
 weighing is the essential characteristic of all judgment. 
 But the dreaming consciousness is without judgment. It 
 is always the incongruous with which it deals. Its work- 
 shop turns out good work only if good material is fur- 
 nished it. It is fancy, imagination, feeling, sentiment, but 
 never ratiocination. The subordinate centers that furnish 
 it with material, that give it legality, and hold it to reality, 
 are sleeping. The factory is without " raw material," and 
 the hands go holidaying. 
 
 In matters esthetic my dreamland is a revelation to 
 me, and in this respect alone frequently transcends reality.
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 341 
 
 I have never taken a dose of cannabis indica or other 
 cerebral stimulant. I have no need of such things. Re- 
 leased from the bonds of the actual, my imagination 
 wanders in dreamland among supersensual delights and 
 basks in the light that never was on sea or shore. I note 
 this peculiar fact : in my enjoyment of dreamland-beauty 
 there is an element of fervor, an implication of the feelings, 
 that I can but barely remember, not experience, as I stand 
 before the most beautiful of real things. May the reason 
 of this be, that in addition to the real being always far 
 from perfect, there is in no waking human life utter ob- 
 livion of its painful and tragic elements, past or present ? 
 Every sense has been outraged, every center of the brain 
 has suffered, and even whilst these may send their most 
 exultant peans of major joy to the higher center of con- 
 sciousness, there must ever intermingle the minor notes 
 and discords of want, insatisfaction, and pain, that keep its 
 harmony from being perfect. But when all sources of such 
 discords are hushed, when these lower centers are asleep, 
 the freed consciousness can revel in joyousness under the 
 fleeting illusion that its mimic life is real. 
 
 XI. Preponderance of Visual Sensations. Motion 
 and vision are the two great factors of mental life, and it 
 is suggestive to find that those animals that so long as 
 possessing motion, keep their eyes and the intelligence 
 that coexists with vision and motility, when they attach 
 themselves permanently to one spot the eyes and intelli- 
 gence are lost. Parasites are usually eyeless, and vege- 
 table parasites are without chlorophyl. The whole wretched 
 order of microbes, molds, and fungi, the curse of the 
 physician and of the world, are parasitic and without 
 chlorophyl. The insane, the idiotic, the weak-minded, the 
 epileptic, have, relatively speaking, very subnormal vision 
 and a defective ocular mechanism.
 
 342 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Above the motor element, the predominant characteris- 
 tic of my dreams is that they are made up of things seen. 
 I do not remember ever to have dreamed of an odor, 
 pleasant or foul, though often dreaming of perfumed or 
 malodorous things. In the same way, though I have 
 dreamed of eating, I preserved no remembrance of im- 
 pressions of taste. The apple I ate I cannot now tell if 
 it were sweet or sour. Tactile sensation is somewhat fre- 
 quently a component of dream-phenomena, but generally 
 only in conjunction with another sensation or feeling that 
 smothers it. If I am struck by another, the feeling or 
 pain, if existent, is at once lost in some psychic emotion, 
 of anger or fear, etc. Pain cannot enter dreamland, be- 
 cause the centers that feel pain are asleep. I never re- 
 member to have remarked in dreams that a thing was ex- 
 ceptionally and peculiarly smooth, or hard, or sticky, etc. 
 I shrink less from touching a foul thing in dreams than in 
 real life. I cannot remember ever to have been cold or 
 oppressively warm in dreamland. If I shiver from cold or 
 am too near a fire I note especially the motion, or sight, 
 or perhaps the feeling of the shivering instead of the cold, 
 and I remember the danger, or the vision of the fire, not 
 the pain. All of this is consonant with the rerepresenta- 
 tive function of consciousness. The senses are represented 
 in it only when awake. As to hearing, few or none of my 
 dreams contain any distinct records of sounds. I can 
 express it no better than to say that the results of hearing 
 are manifest, but not the sounds themselves. I speak and 
 am spoken to, and act accordingly, but I am never able to 
 recall any timbre of voice, any inflection, emphasis, or 
 pitch that causes the voice to be, at the time, thought of as 
 remarkable, or that gave its noteworthiness, if it had any, 
 enough vividness to project it across the bridge of awaking 
 into a work-day memory. When awake, nothing so fires
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 343 
 
 me with uncontrollable emotion as the music of Beethoven, 
 Wagner, or Franz. I cannot remember ever to have heard 
 music in dreamland. 
 
 But how different it is with the sense of vision ! Every- 
 thing not motion and that is largely so is a thing seen. 
 How empty and destitute must be the dreamland of the 
 congenitally-blind! To me vision gives dreamland all its 
 beauty and most of its interest. It could hardly be other- 
 wise, since the same is true of the waking consciousness. 
 Intellect, indeed, is almost entirely formed of visual factors ; 
 every component of what we call psychic life and civiliza- 
 tion is largely the product of vision. Language and the 
 letters of the alphabet themselves are the records of things 
 seen. Vision is at once the most metaphysical of real, 
 and the most real of metaphysical things. Astride a ray 
 of light Puck passes in a flash from matter to mind. The 
 library of the soul, memory, is a picture-gallery. An 
 absolute monochromatic world would force the spirit to 
 suicide. Had all eyes been absolutely color-blind Psyche 
 would not have been born. It is the associate fibers from 
 and to the visual center that bind together the world of 
 mind and the world of matter, and that loans life its value, 
 and crowns it with -its one unalloyed delight. We sleep at 
 night when the eyes, the great awakeners, ministers and 
 producers of intellect and life, are least utilizable. Few 
 people, and only those of stolid and blunted sensibilities, 
 can sleep in the light, even with what darkness closed lids 
 give. It is interesting to see how all living forms, both 
 animal and vegetable, dwindle to wretched caricatures of 
 life, when, eyeless and colorless, they keep up existence in 
 caves and in the sea-depths.* 
 
 XII. Character, the Soul, and Consciousness. In 
 
 * See Packard, " On Certain Factors of Evolution," the American Natur- 
 alist, September, 1888.
 
 344 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 a superb story of Gautier, a lover, by his power of magic, 
 is able to lull into a death-like trance the being of his 
 successful rival. This lover then steals the body of the 
 young husband, his rival, and, leaving his own soul in the 
 entranced body to care for it, the passionate lover plans 
 to trick the faithful wife. The conception is a proof of 
 genius ! Think of it ! The lover stole a body that thereby 
 he might steal a love, that, in the absence of his own body, 
 was of course not carnal. On the part of the husband 
 one meets a multitude of questions, principal of which 
 would perhaps be, How far would he have been cheated 
 had the thief been successful ? On the part of the lady 
 strange trials and mystic queries also arise. Remember 
 that if only her husband's soul were absent, there were 
 present every trick of motion, play of expression, timbre 
 of voice, nay, every habit of mind and body, that is in any 
 way controlled by the laws of corporeal and nervous 
 organization or by heredity. What would be different ? 
 Both lovers would be equally kind, lovable, and loving. 
 Both would express their inner feeling by the same acts 
 and by the same mechanism. Some one said that the 
 Yankee worked badly where soul and body touched. 
 Would you suppose the thieving lover's soul could not 
 avoid an awkwardness in handling the mental centers and, 
 through them, the body he had stolen ? I bring the idea 
 forward here to illustrate, firstly, how far " character " is a 
 matter of flesh and nervous organization ; and, secondly, 
 how little there is in the so-called " soul " but an imper- 
 sonal force. If two of your best friends could change 
 " souls," would you ever find it out ? I confess that after 
 a rigid exclusion of the elements of character that neces- 
 sarily inhere in the action of the body and of all subor- 
 dinate motor and sensory centers, I find, if anything be 
 left, it is a very impalpable and impersonal somewhat. Now 
 this is precisely what sleep does. If, therefore, the dream-
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 345 
 
 ing consciousness could have its photograph taken, it 
 would have no recognizable or distinguishing trait of ex- 
 pression. We should never know our disembodied friends. 
 Dream-personality has no individuality. And thus, through 
 physiologic psychology, we catch a glimpse of the pro- 
 found truth that, at heart, we are all the same. One com- 
 mon unity lives in us all, and our jealousies, bickerings, 
 differences, and hates are but the expression of the acci- 
 dents of body ; our love and kindness, the expression of 
 the one life that feeds all our lives. Dream-philosophy 
 teaches religion and sympathy. There is nothing more 
 noble or more philosophically demanded of us all than, to 
 one another, simple kindness. It is at once the most 
 human and the most divine thing in this sorry world. 
 
 It is evident that a cluster of nerve-cells in the cortex of 
 the brain whose function it is to receive stimuli and answer 
 the same with messages, e. g., to a muscle to contract, it 
 is clear, that such a mechanically acting center is not the 
 "soul," or even a part of it. A paralyzed man is just so 
 much a man spiritually and mentally as before the ather- 
 omatous blood-vessel drowned the Rolandic convolution. 
 Paralyze every bodily muscle, and the fact remains essen- 
 tially the same. But it is not so with the frontal lobes of 
 the brain. Render them functionless by trauma, disease, 
 or the hypnotic enslaver, and consciousness, mind, soul, 
 give no evidences of existence. Slice off the frontal por- 
 tions of the brain of the poor pigeon, and life, power, habit 
 continue, but not what it had of mind. We may be thank- 
 ful that it is impossible and useless to slice from behind 
 forward and leave only the living organ of consciousness. 
 But this is almost exactly what sleep does, harm- 
 lessly and lovingly, however, and it is of the greatest 
 interest to see what a world is left after all peripheral stimu- 
 lation and subordinate centers are stilled into temporary 
 death by its kind hand. Dreams show us how great is the 
 30
 
 346 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 world, how shadowy a thing is the essential ego. The 
 soul, deprived of the body, seems quite as unreal and 
 phantom-like as any of Charon's passengers. It is so pro- 
 foundly dependent upon the crude senses and experience, 
 upon memory and motion to give it regulation, order, and 
 reality. As, one after another, sleep strips us of these 
 things, that at best are but supplies of soul so paler and 
 ever thinner, ever less individual, grows the ego. Picture- 
 making in its last analysis is not strictly psychic, and yet 
 a visionless world would be absolutely a soulless world. 
 Dream-consciousness is consciousness without adventitious 
 aids, physical props, content, and checks, it is conscious- 
 ness, per se ; it is, in truth, a fluttering memory of a memory 
 of past experiences ; its life a mimic play ; its phantasmal 
 existence is upborne upon the ghostly wings of past sorrows 
 and joys, and tied to reality by the tenuous thread of a 
 momentarily interrupted sensation. Its master, the body, 
 suddenly tugs at the silken cord, and from freedom it swiftly 
 descends and slips into the yoke of reality, attentive to the 
 thousand demands of its imperious and all-precious 
 sovereign ! 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 To the Editor of The Open Court : 
 
 Among many interesting communications to me regard- 
 ing my paper in a late number of your journal there is one 
 of peculiar interest from one of your subscribers in Eng- 
 land. He states that he has been able to conquer an in- 
 somnia of long standing by the device of looking down- 
 ward when trying to go to sleep. He was prevailed upon 
 to try the device of, in fancy, watching the breath escape 
 from his own nostrils. He found this successful, but con- 
 cluded that the rotation of the eye downward was the 
 essential factor. Thinking of this, I have wondered if this 
 were not something more than an individual idiosyncracy,
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 347^ 
 
 if, indeed, it were not founded upon a true basis of cerebral 
 habit and necessity. That the eye is the most easily react- 
 ing of all sense-mechanisms is a truism, and that of all it is 
 the most intimately connected with all cerebral and psy- 
 chologic processes. Not only this, but the facts of func- 
 tional amblyopia from prolonged exposure to light, such 
 as moon-blindness, snow-blindness, etc., show how injuries 
 to the eye is such continuous stimulus. Neither for the 
 objects of shutting out the external world of light nor for 
 protection to the eyes is the darkening of the lids sufficient. 
 Sound sleep and retinal safety demand either a complete 
 external darkness, or a rotation during sleep, as my corres- 
 pondent says he has found in his own case, of the eye-ball 
 upward beneath the arch of the eye-brow. I believe it has 
 been experimentally found that in sleep the globes do 
 rotate upward. It may, however, be true that the necessity 
 was greater and the fact more constant in primitive or 
 savage man than in the civilized man of to-day. The 
 savage slept more frequently in the open air. But if true 
 in either case, the mechanism whereby this act was done 
 required a constant expenditure of force to effect it, and 
 therefore a watchfulness, an activity of nerve centers some- 
 where, that rendered the whole cerebral machinery less 
 passive than if it were not compelled to keep up such con- 
 tinuous functional output. Somnolence was therefore less 
 complete, the restorage function more drawn upon, the 
 " sentinel " was more alert. If, therefore, such continuous 
 innervation of the superior recti serve to keep the cerebral 
 organism from sinking so speedily or completely into 
 slumber, then relieving it from such duty of out-going 
 stimulation would thus serve to becalm and quiet it. Re- 
 versal of the habitual bulbar rotation would thus serve to 
 relieve the centers of the superior recti and divide the 
 stimulus to the inferior, thus setting up a sort of relief and 
 rest for the too continuously acting center. It is true that
 
 348 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 during waking the superior rectus has the least work of all 
 the muscles, and therefore is better able to take up the 
 continuous work of the night; it is also true that excessive 
 innervation of the inferior rectus would be as arousing as 
 that of the superior, and, finally, it may be said that the 
 habit in the civilized man, sleeping as he does in closed 
 rooms, might be dropped ; but there remains as answer 
 that continuous contraction of a muscle means waking 
 activity of the center and its correlates ; that the lower 
 rectus will only be kept functional while the would-be 
 sleeper is consciously making the effort ; and lastly, that 
 old habits of nature or man are not soon stopped. Would 
 not a better plan than that of my correspondent be that of 
 slowly and rhythmically putting all the muscles of the eyes 
 into alternate function, each for a few minutes at a time ? 
 
 To the Editor of The Open Court : 
 
 The scholarly article entitled " Dreams, Sleep, and Con- 
 sciousness," which appeared in a late number of your 
 paper, recalls a reminiscence of my own which seems to 
 confirm Dr. Gould's opinion, that sensory communication 
 may be had directly with (the organ of?) consciousness 
 without connection or communication by means of the 
 ordinary senses of perception. Perhaps Dr. Gould's theory 
 of the manner in which this takes place may be modified 
 by subsequent research, but the fact itself can scarcely be 
 questioned. 
 
 Some years ago I was living in a California mining-town 
 of several thousand inhabitants. The greater part of the 
 town consisted of frame buildings packed closely together, 
 offering the most favorable conditions for the rapid spread 
 of fire, and the total destruction of the town should fire 
 once gain a headway. This fact was fully appreciated and 
 several volunteer fire-companies were equipped by the 
 citizens. It is hardly necessary to say that every ear was
 
 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 349 
 
 alert for the clang of the fire-bell, and at its first sound 
 there was an instant gathering of volunteers. 
 
 One night in midsummer, after I had been several hours 
 in bed, my usually dreamless sleep was suddenly disturbed 
 by a vivid dream of fire. I saw the flames break out from 
 the roof of the building, and, in my dream, ran to the 
 engine-house and pulled vigorously at the ropes that 
 sounded the alarm-bell. The resulting clangor was so 
 loud that it awakened me, but the sound which I heard in 
 my dreams was not a dream-fancy, it was the actual ring- 
 ing of the bell, and my first act of consciousness was the 
 perception of this fact. 
 
 Now, it is incredible that a chance dream of fire could 
 have occurred at such an opportune moment. Such a 
 coincidence is, of course, possible, but as improbable as the 
 chance coincidence of certain Fraunhofer lines with the 
 spectrum of iron. It is far more reasonable to suppose 
 that the strokes of the bell reached my consciousness first 
 by some other channel than the auditory nerves. The 
 vibratory impact aroused consciousness, perhaps imper- 
 fectly, but still more faithfully than in the case of Dr. 
 Gould and his Thomas cat. In the latter case conscious- 
 ness was lured into the belief that the discordant cater- 
 wauling was the sweetest of music; in the former there 
 was no deception. The first alarm struck upon my con- 
 sciousness was the alarm of Fire ! In this instance 
 consciousness was in the wrong as to locality and sur- 
 roundings, for while the dream-fire was consuming the 
 school-house on the hill, the real fire was in an unoccupied 
 building some distance away, but it was not deceived as 
 to the fact. 
 
 Dr. Gould mentions also another peculiar feature which 
 perhaps may be reckoned among dream-phenomena 
 namely, the dream of impending danger which leads to the 
 conscious necessity of awakening. This condition, which
 
 350 DREAMS, SLEEP, AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 is usually brought about by an interruption of the function 
 of some nerve-trunk, is one of which most people have an 
 experience at some time or other in life, and all who have 
 passed through it can bear testimony to the energy spent 
 in rousing the body into action. Dr. Gould premises his 
 description of this phenomena with the statement that he 
 lies prone upon his back, and then says he can at first move 
 only one or two fingers, or perhaps sway his head. In my 
 own experience, while the general conditions are the same, 
 the manifestations are different. I invariably sleep on my 
 side, and in the process of awakening, begin by moving 
 the foot of the upper limb. I am not able to move head 
 or hands in the least, and the reason is the same as in Dr. 
 Gould's case. The stimulation of the motor nerve-centers, 
 although to consciousness the result of a tremendous ex- 
 penditure of energy, is but a slight one hardly more than 
 sufficient, in fact, to perform its work. Directed by con- 
 sciousness, it must therefore exert its effort in that part of 
 the body which, because of its position, is most easily 
 moved, or in the least constrainment of position. 
 
 In both of the instances noted, the facts show that con- 
 sciousness may act and react without the intermediation of 
 the lower centers. In the case of the fire-alarm, conscious- 
 ness was aroused and received a message through the 
 sensory fibers ; in the nightmare, it was on the qui vive, 
 putting forth almost superhuman efforts to stimulate the 
 inert and irresponsive motor-centers into action. 
 
 J. W. REDWAY.
 
 HUMAN LIFE UNDER DENIED SENSATION.* 
 
 The writer once experienced an odd series of feelings 
 that brought vividly to mind the fact that life and emotion 
 and happiness are compatible with great differences in and 
 deprivations of ordinary mental stimuli. A social gather- 
 ing was going on in a large hall, 'and the sounds of excel- 
 lent music, dancing, laughter, and gayety came from this 
 room where a hundred or more happy folk were passing 
 happy hours. Upon opening the door and being ushered 
 into the hall the room was found to be as dark as midnight 
 Not a thing could be seen. It was the social hour of the 
 inmates of an institution for the blind ! The first uncanny, 
 creepy feeling was soon dissipated by the thought of con- 
 gratulation that indomitable mind and spontaneous emo- 
 tion, though deprived of light and vision, could still find 
 satisfaction and play through the medium of indirect 
 sensation. Soul still conquered sense ! 
 
 The same thought is exemplified and emphasized by a 
 consideration of the report of the Convention of Deaf- 
 Mutes, lately held in Allentown, Pa. One is apt thought- 
 lessly to pass over the beginning of the report, that says, 
 " The meeting was called to order by the president, who 
 rapped vigorously on the desk to attract the attention of 
 his audience." An audience of deaf-mutes called to order 
 by a noise ! Those who see a blind man tapping the street 
 in front of him as he walks are likely to think that this is 
 solely to avoid objects that the cane may strike. It is also 
 to avoid objects that the cane does not strike because to 
 
 * From the Medical News, October 24, 1891. 
 351
 
 352 HUMAN LIFE UNDER DENIED SENSATION. 
 
 the blind man's ears and hand there is a timbre from blows 
 upon the pavement near its edge, near posts or steps, that 
 is very different from the resonance when the blow is not 
 near such objects. It is said that blinded bats are able to 
 fly unharmed, avoiding objects in their flight by means of 
 the perception of an increase of barometric pressure of the 
 air close to those objects so sensitive to variations of 
 pressure is the expanded interdigital membrane. (The 
 experimental blinding of the bat, however, was not neces- 
 sary, because millions of bats winter in Mammoth Cave, 
 miles from the faintest ray of light.) 
 
 A suggestion is indirectly aroused by this fact as to the 
 " relaying," if one may so speak, of crude and faint stimu- 
 lation by the mechanism of the nerve-ganglia and centers. 
 There is a nervous device that reinforces and transforms 
 whilst also repeating the subtle, weak, and in themselves 
 meaningless, hints of the external world that we call 
 sense-impression. It is the living prototype of the electri- 
 cian's " relay " and microphone combined. Thus all man's 
 mechanic devices are but poor imitations and repetitions 
 of what Life's vital forces have long ago brought to won- 
 drous perfection. 
 
 In the Deaf-Mutes' Convention prayer was said, the roll 
 called, addresses made, business conducted, and long 
 sessions held all in the sign language all in silence ! 
 " The amended constitution and by-laws were adopted 
 after a lively debated If present, our blind friends would 
 certainly have thought the meeting very strange and 
 stupid. But the success in raising funds for a proposed 
 home for aged and infirm mutes, and the discussion of 
 other worthy objects, made the gathering a very interesting 
 one for the attending delegates. 
 
 According to the Paris correspondent of the London Times 
 the method of analyzing motion by the chronophotograph, 
 which has been so happily applied by M. Marey in the
 
 HUMAN LIFE UNDER DENIED SENSATION. 353 
 
 case of moving animals, such as horses running or birds 
 and insects in flight, has recently been employed by M. G. 
 Demeny, a preparator at the physiologic station of M. 
 Marey, to examine the movements of the lips in speaking. 
 He has obtained results which show that the form of the 
 mouth is quite different for the different articulate sounds. 
 With these photographs combined in a zoetrope he has re- 
 produced the movements of the lips by synthesis. An 
 ordinary person finds it difficult to read the words by the 
 animated pictures ; but a deaf-mute who has been accus- 
 tomed to read from the lips of a speaker found it easy to 
 do so from the photographs. A young pupil of the 
 National Institute of Deaf-Mutes in France could read the 
 vowels and diphthongs as well as the labials. The first 
 experiments were, of course, not all that could be desired ; 
 but, in bringing the matter before the French Academy 
 of Sciences, M. Demeny expressed the hope that in con- 
 tinuing his researches he would be able to develop a new 
 method of educating deaf-mutes by sight from more per- 
 fect photographic images. Obviously a magic-lantern 
 lecture might be delivered to an audience of deaf-mutes in 
 this way. 
 
 The encouraging and deeply suggestive fact of rescuing 
 the faculty and power of speech in these deaf-mutes is one 
 that must command the sympathy of all. There is no 
 limit to the ingenuity of Life and to her triumphs over 
 adverse circumstances and deprived stimuli. We have all 
 read of another striking example very different in kind, 
 of course, but illustrating the same great truth. One of 
 England's greatest statesmen was blind ; so was a great 
 numismatologist ; and another of her great men, a hunter 
 and rider of unexampled daring, a peerless sportsman, an 
 excellent business man and active administrator, had 
 neither arms, hands, legs, nor feet. One is reminded of 
 Emerson's cool answer to the Millerite who excitedly told
 
 354 HUMAN LIFE UNDER DENIED SENSATION. 
 
 him that the world was to come to an end that day: " Oh ! 
 well," said the philosopher, " we can get on very well 
 without it." 
 
 It would seem that if loss of sight were added to loss 
 of hearing and speech, naught but tragedy and melancholy 
 could be left, or that the routine life of the lowest func- 
 tions of nutrition, etc., would persist. But there are few 
 happier and brighter-minded people than Laura Bridgman 
 was and Helen Keller is. Another, a man likewise de- 
 prived of these great avenues of influence from and 
 communication with the external world, without which 
 life to us would seen so barren, traveled all over the United 
 States alone, raised a family, and lived out his period of 
 brave and satisfied life. He could talk to anybody by 
 means of the ingenious device of tattooing the English 
 alphabet upon different parts of his hand. Words and 
 sentences were spelled out and recognized by the positions 
 of the letters touched. 
 
 The emotional life of these imprisoned souls, cut off 
 from so many relations and avenues of interchange 
 with the external world, must be all the more vivid 
 and hypersensitive. A coarse jar of the hyperesthetic 
 receiving end-organ of sense is transformed into a 
 rude thunder by the highly attuned and delicately re- 
 sponsive microphone of the inner sensation-making 
 mechanism. Thus the possibility of causing sharp sorrow 
 is a necessary concomitant of the ease of eliciting joy. It 
 is the glory of civilization to care for such and shield them 
 from pain, and it is the delight of medicine to minister to 
 them its healing. It is hard to sympathetically understand 
 and realize the inner life of these almost windowless minds. 
 How strange must seem to them the dreams and somnam- 
 bulisms of never-to-be-awakened emotions, the dumb 
 reaching out toward reality of denied possibilities, the 
 unsatisfied hungerings of imprisoned sensibilities. Their
 
 HUMAN LIFE UNDER DENIED SENSATION. 355 
 
 minds must be thrilled by dim hereditary echoes and the 
 far-away caresses of ghostly ancestral hands. With what 
 pathetic half-responsiveness do these shut-in souls catch 
 the shimmer of long-departed life, that comes to them like 
 the last faint evening flushings reflected from distant moun- 
 tain-tops to valley-dwellers that are in the night.
 
 IMMORTALITY.* 
 
 If you sit down in the quiet of your own room and 
 calmly ask yourself what it is in reference to a life after 
 death that you really desire and what you may reasonably 
 expect, you will probably be surprised to find what a blank 
 your mind is upon the subject. I doubt if you will find 
 that you inwardly desire it, in the same manner, for exam- 
 ple, that you desire wealth, or fame, or beauty. You have 
 grown up in the belief that it is right to desire and believe, 
 but that, you know, is quite a different affair from actual 
 yearning. 
 
 Nearly every one puts the thought aside as beyond solu- 
 tion. One says, " My thinking will not change the fact, 
 nor my longing bring it about. The duty of the passing 
 day is all I can fulfil." Under this cover of postponed 
 examination the world has grown as indifferent to the 
 question as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear of 
 offending delicate sensibilities and established beliefs keeps 
 the doubter and modifier silent ; whilst the extreme of the 
 omnivorous believer is set over against the out-and-out 
 denier. But the great majority of people are neither 
 believers nor disbelievers, but indifferentists slowly set- 
 tling toward an agnostic noncommittalism that is destructive 
 of all intellectual and moral earnestness. 
 
 It is my conviction that this abrogation of curiosity and 
 examination is a most culpable and dangerous fact. If we 
 live after death it is of tremendous importance ; if we do 
 not, it is of no less vital import, and the belief, the disbelief, 
 
 * From The Monht, April, 1891. 
 356
 
 IMMORTALITY. 357 
 
 or the evasion is of the most constant influence, uncon- 
 sciously, subtly, upon every thought and act of every day's 
 living. 
 
 Suppose now we divest ourselves of the creeps and 
 shudders usually accompanying a discussion of death and 
 immortality, and fearlessly test the common dogma with a 
 little analysis in the light of scientific research and reason. 
 Let us suppose you are a believer : what is it you believe ? 
 You desire : what is it you desire, and how far is your 
 desire feasible ? You are convinced : but what is the 
 truth ? If possible, in what way and to what extent is a 
 future life possible? If attainable, by whom and by what 
 means ? Moreover, the kind of belief makes all the differ- 
 ence in the world. I have read somewhere about an African 
 chief who killed his wife's lover, and was defeated at last 
 by his wife's unswerving belief in immortality she com- 
 mitting suicide in order to join her lover. But the chief 
 was equal to the emergency, and he in turn killed himself 
 in order to follow the pair and break up their tete-a-tetes in 
 the other world ! It all depends upon what you propose 
 doing with the future life after you get it. You might 
 just as well be digging clams on this earth as " singing 
 Hosannas around the throne " in heaven. 
 
 Do you believe in or fervently desire what, with splendid 
 bravery and abandon, the old creed called " the resurrection 
 of the body " ? Terrible counter-queries arise : At what 
 age in your life would you choose as best representing the 
 ideal body for your resurrection ? Would you prefer 
 your body as it was when you were a child, when youthful, 
 when mature, or when old ? Moreover, it is changing 
 every minute, this body. It is estimated that something 
 like five million blood-corpuscles die every second of your 
 life. Even the two or three pounds of minerals in one's 
 bones are only a little more permanently fixed. All com- 
 ponent parts are undergoing change every instant : they
 
 358 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 soon become grass, grain, or tree, passing again into others' 
 bodies, and so on forever. Is it the form and feature you 
 desire to preserve and not the constituent particles ? But 
 form and feature change every day or year, and are as im- 
 possible to fix as the atoms themselves. Indeed, is not the 
 whole matter put beyond choice by the evident fact that un- 
 less by the fiat of an extramundane deity the only moment 
 possible to fix the bodily form in the mold of eternity 
 would be the death-moment? And yet this were the most 
 undesirable of all seasons, since at that hour the body is in 
 the weakest, most useless, and most wretched condition of 
 all the hours it has served us. Supposing, therefore, that 
 you are so in love with your own body that you would 
 wish to call it into life again and forever ; we see at once 
 that no moment or phase of development could be chosen, 
 except perhaps the dying moment, the least desirable of 
 all, and that the particles of one's body have served their 
 turn in myriad other bodies, each having an equally valid 
 claim to his "property." Besides this, the absurdity of the 
 whole is emphasized by the crushing fact that all the 
 organic matter of the world has been used over and over 
 for bodies, and the earth has not enough hydrocarbons to 
 fit out again with bodies a small fraction of the souls that 
 have lived upon it. Doubtless the combined weight of all 
 the organic bodies that have lived on the earth would be 
 many times the total weight of the globe, including its 
 minerals, elements, and gases. It may be frankly admitted 
 that no bodily resurrection is possible. 
 
 And it is as certainly undesirable. The old dogma 
 was the crudest materialism, wholly unworthy of the cred- 
 ence of those who pretended to believe that God was a 
 spirit, and that they were his children. The belief in 
 bodily resurrection was a natural concomitant of the age of 
 sensualism before the mind and spirit had risen to their 
 modern heritage. The desire for such a resurrection
 
 IMMORTALITY. 359 
 
 stamps the person with a self-confessed imperfection of 
 mental and moral development. The impossibility of such 
 a resurrection is one of many proofs that life is no sensual- 
 ist at heart and that ideality is the final outcome, the trend 
 of actuality. Nature compels us to take wings, though 
 the sluggish Psyche lingers lovingly in the pretty little 
 cocoon of materiality she has built about herself. 
 
 Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, or intellect that 
 you desire to perpetuate forever ? Frankly, now, are you 
 so in love with your mental outfit? In your more modest 
 and sane hours are you not sadly conscious how very im- 
 perfect it is ? While we are young and very conceited we 
 may be filled with self satisfaction and trust in our own 
 judgment, but as the years drag by, we, looking back over 
 the past, grow more and more conscious that our intellect 
 is not to be trusted. Think of the interminable series of 
 blunders of which your life is the record ? How poorly 
 you have misjudged people and circumstances ! How your 
 reason has fooled you many times and again ! How many 
 illusions and delusions have you lived through ! With 
 what sad clearness you now see your former stupidities, 
 and with what blindness you fail to see your present ones ! 
 Looking about you, you find others equally as gifted as 
 yourself holding your opinions as loathsome. Looking 
 above you, you see the most intellectual and the most 
 educated diametrically opposed in their opinions of God, 
 man, and nature. Two great men, two brothers, learned 
 and trained in dialectic and logic, soon grow apart. One 
 becomes a cardinal of the Romish Church, accepting Papal 
 infallibility and a thousand such absurdities, the other as 
 firmly convinced that the fallacies of the English Church 
 are God's gospel. Looking below you, you see the great 
 mass of men wrecking their minds and lives upon a thou- 
 sand outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There is no sadder 
 spectacle in the world than this that the people love error.
 
 360 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 But each one, with imperturbable conceit, is convinced that 
 he sees better and plainer than another. Every partisan ? 
 Democrat or Republican, has no sort of doubt that he is 
 right about every financial or governmental measure, 
 though he has never studied finance, history, or political 
 economy five minutes. He does not dream that he is a 
 dupe of the politicians and of his own lack of intellect. 
 All history is a tangle of such poverty-stricken intellec- 
 tion. One can but be amazed at the proneness of every- 
 body to see things and do things every way but the right 
 way. And this is the kind of a mental equipment you 
 would stamp with the seal of eternity ! 
 
 Possibly you may protest that it is a more perfect and 
 purified intellect that you wish. Ah, yes, but that would 
 not be your intellect. You want to be made over, made 
 into another person. That would not be your immortality, 
 but that of another. That would imply that it is pure in- 
 tellect and perfect, in the abstract, that you are interested 
 in. Have you shown much interest in that sort of intellect 
 in the past? If you wish such an immortality of a per- 
 fected intellect you must certainly possess it before it can 
 be made everlasting. 
 
 Perhaps, again, you will say that it is the ever-progressive, 
 ever-growing intellect you desire. This is subterfuge. 
 That is not what you wish but what you would take in de- 
 fault of your first choice. Lessing said that if God held 
 out to him absolute truth in one hand and in the other the 
 everlasting search for truth, he would choose the latter. 
 But the condition of everlasting search would be the con- 
 dition of everlasting imperfection of intellect. Lessing's 
 choice seems to me impious. 
 
 I therefore conclude that at heart you do not wish to 
 eternalize your crude, imperfect intellect, and that the sole 
 method of getting an exalted and perfected intellect is to 
 cultivate it here and now. Have you in the past obeyed
 
 IMMORTALITY. 361 
 
 reason and not passion or self-interest? Have you studied 
 logic, history, and science with a sincere desire to do your 
 political and social duty, and to free yourself from preju- 
 dice, error, superstition, and conceit? If not, why should 
 God suddenly endow you with a perfect intellect ready- 
 made? Is it God's way in this world to give excellencies 
 unasked and unearned? Rest assured He will not do it at 
 your dying hour. It is no particular merit in you to die ; 
 why should you be rewarded with a new intellect then ? 
 
 Or, again, you may say that it is not so much your in- 
 tellect that you wish to make immortal as it is your 
 emotional nature, affection, etc. Love and friendship, you 
 complain, are cut off by death, and the tendrils of the heart 
 die because they find nothing to cling to or rest upon. 
 You would like to renew beyond the grave the love and 
 sympathy that has made the earth-life endurable, and even 
 beautiful. Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are you 
 really satisfied with your devotion and love ? Have not 
 your outgoings of the heart been quite fickle, illogic, 
 selfish, and calculating? Has not your love and gratitude 
 been often a lively sense of benefits to come? Has your 
 love to woman not been of the " Kreutzer-Sonata " type, a 
 little better and more subtly-concealed, perhaps, but at 
 heart the same ? If you are a woman, have you been seek- 
 ing to get or to give love, and has your little affection been 
 but payment for protection and a home? Have you 
 chosen true and noble friends and been true and noble to 
 them ? Has your charity been but alms-giving without 
 kind sympathy and helpfulness ? Have you as married 
 folk, perhaps, been, as the cant phrase has it, " devoted to 
 each other," but oblivious of the duty of affection toward 
 the rest of the world grinning examples of egoisme a 
 deux? Is your family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfish- 
 ness ? Do you at heart care much for anybody except 
 your own precious self? And a too exclusive love, even 
 3'
 
 362 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 of the purest type, may be sin in God's eyes. If you bind 
 all your affection upon one weak life you risk a precious 
 value upon too single and narrow an object, and deprive 
 others of the sympathy that need it more. " Just wrapt up 
 in one," as the sentimental jargon has it, is often, if not 
 always, a pleasant way of great sin. Affection may become 
 morbid a disease quite as well as any abuse or exag- 
 geration of any other characteristic. 
 
 I take it that they who are the most satisfied with the 
 strength, purity, and constancy of their love and emotional 
 nature are precisely they that have neither actual strength, 
 purity, nor constancy of sentiment, and are thus accurately 
 they that should not have immortality. 
 
 Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the affectional 
 nature are such as you wish made eternal, are you any 
 better contented with your moral nature? The question at 
 once raises a smile. The feeling of our own ethical 
 unworthiness has crystallized into the great Christian 
 dogma of Christ's vicarious sacrifice : in the words of the 
 old hymn, " Jesus died and paid it all, all the debt I owe." 
 No man hoped to get to heaven on his own merits. Much 
 of the zeal of religion has consisted in the joy of the belief 
 that by a sleight of-hand trick a big sponge of forgiveness 
 was wiped over the ethical debit and credit account by the 
 lacrimose deity, whose occupation, as Heine said, was to 
 forgive. History is one long, monotonous list of man's 
 sins and inhumanities. I think it probable that you will 
 not urge the ethical aspect ; I would leave that plea aside. 
 We all know that we are very much like a lot of pigs, each 
 after the most and best corn and the warmest bed. The 
 amazing immorality of trying to get to heaven on another's 
 merits was the most brazen example of how little heaven- 
 liness there was in the heaven-hunters and heaven-sealers. 
 Of course, too, the desire for heaven itself, the desire for 
 one's happiness, was immoral when conditioned upon the
 
 IMMORTALITY. 363 
 
 misery of others. Nature in this respect is better than 
 man, denying him his childish materialistic desires and 
 forcing him to wait for immortality until he can learn to 
 live in the spirit and seek no selfish heaven. 
 
 Just as the body is ever changing, and it is impossible to 
 seize upon any hour when we could eternalize it, except at 
 the undesirable death-hour, so it is the same in reference 
 to intellect, love, and morality. There are no two days in 
 life when we are the same. As to intellect, we have little 
 before adult life is reached, and most people have little 
 after fifty or sixty years. It is proverbial that no one 
 changes his opinion after that age, but lives on old preju- 
 dices and ideas. The mental powers get into ruts and 
 habits, true reason being abrogated. As to love, we laugh 
 at our fickleness, and our habits and ideals of friendship 
 get sordid as each year strips off the freedom and expan- 
 siveness of youth and the dear, cold ghost of self is more 
 exclusively worshiped. And our ethical standards change 
 with each day's passing. We have at every hour to clutch 
 ourselves by the throat and cry, " Stay ! Who art thou ?" 
 And lo ! while we ask our protean self the question, we 
 have become another. We seek perpetuity of existence 
 for something ever becoming other. We seek personal 
 identity after death, but we have no personal identity before 
 death how then can we have it afterward ? Do you not 
 see that what makes you recognizable, different from other 
 individuals, and what would make personal immortality 
 possible depends upon the accidents of organization, 
 depends firstly upon the bodily peculiarity, and secondly 
 upon imperfections of mind that you do not wish to per- 
 petuate ? Twins sometimes wear knots of ribbon as sig- 
 nals whereby their friends may recognize them. Our faces 
 and bodies are but such little symbols or signals that our 
 souls have hung out for the day. Divest your best friend 
 of his body, and would you recognize him ? Have you
 
 364 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 ever thought how the photograph of your friend's soul 
 would look ? If bodily form and imperfections make up 
 the most of what we call individuality, it becomes evident 
 that in casting off imperfection we become less narrow, 
 less individual. As you become freed from the cramp- 
 ing littleness of self-love and the bonds of self-gratifi- 
 cation, as you rise into the life of the spirit, you find 
 yourself less individual. One fitted for a true heaven 
 would not care for the old immortality. What is good to 
 carry over into the future life is not so much personal 
 identity as personal nonidentity, not so much the imper- 
 fections that make us individuals as the perfections that 
 free us from individualism. We must lose our life to find 
 it. We have overestimated the value of individuality. 
 Self-consciousness has become hypertrophied, and the 
 suinmum bonum of life is held to be the preservation of a 
 little puckered-up individuality. This over-development 
 of individualism is doubtless due to the fierce struggle man 
 has had to elevate himself out of savagery. It has been 
 possible only through excessive carefulness and love of the 
 ego. The struggle for existence is now taking on class 
 and corporate characteristics, so that the common weal is 
 an ideal quite as much as individual satisfaction and safety. 
 Hence the exaggeration of personality may now return to 
 something like a healthy normalism. As a natural out- 
 growth and consequence of this over-development of the 
 individual consciousness, there came the absurd attempt to 
 carry over into the after-life the same sort of existence that 
 had been developed here, consisting in a neglect of the 
 actual world of one's descendants, an ignoring of death 
 that ends the body and products of organization, and a 
 failure to see that a future life after death must be a life of 
 the spirit, of perfections, and of the common life, not of 
 peculiarities and imperfections. 
 
 If this seems an aery height and a too rare air, it argues
 
 IMMORTALITY. 365 
 
 against your preparation for the only desirable as well as 
 the only possible kind of immortality. It argues against 
 you just in the same way that your horror of death does. 
 It is only participation in the divine life of the spirit that 
 can see death as right and good. Death comes to shatter 
 our baseless trust in the evanescent physical, and teach us 
 dependence upon the everlasting spiritual. They dread 
 death whose life is of the physical type. God never gave 
 to man a greater blessing, after life itself, than death, and 
 nothing more strikingly proves the divine government of 
 the world than the certainty of its coming to us all. If 
 death is your enemy, life is not your friend. The brutal 
 attempt to ignore the fact, the belief that the body, with its 
 pack of heathenish appetites and needs, could push through 
 death and come out fresh and renewed on the other side is 
 the very insanity of individualism and the intoxication of 
 materialism. The mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror 
 of death God-sent if anything is is practical pessimism 
 and reckless atheism. Death's one lesson is that we must 
 love and cultivate what he cannot touch. One who has 
 lived a life of kindness and spirituality has no horror of 
 death, and to him it has little mystery. But to him whose 
 divinity has been self and whose religion the worship ol 
 his physiologic senses, death must be the ugliest of enemies 
 who is to rob him of his all. Did you ever notice how life 
 is plastic and free when first fashioning for itself a body ? 
 " All heaven lies about us in our infancy." In youth we 
 are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. As the years go by the 
 power of the organization, the material, grows, and limits 
 more and more the freedom of the spirit. Frankenstein 
 turns upon its maker. With age men get narrow, cold, 
 calculating; women snaky, scheming, cruel. The soul 
 finds itself more and more the slave instead of the master, 
 and by and by when the slavery becomes unendurable, it 
 takes flight, and this you call death. It is the body's re-
 
 366 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 ward for insubordination. I think we deserve little sym- 
 pathy for dying. Most of us have well-merited death 
 before it comes I speak, of course, only of the death of 
 those in life's afternoon. Few keep the young life pliant 
 and free beyond the age of fifty. If people could see that 
 life is the maker and molder of organization, and if they 
 would seek immortality upon earth, I believe men might 
 come to live a hundred years. Trees learn, to live thou- 
 sands of years, but they keep youth, and spring, and trust, 
 and love forever nestling with the birds among the rejuv- 
 enescent leaves of spring. We die not because the body is 
 weak, but because it has become too strong. We die be- 
 cause there is no real continuance and strength in anything 
 but the nonphysical, and we have trusted in the physical. 
 Matter without free life is inert, moved only from without : 
 the dead body is simply matter without life. It is not the 
 blacksmith's arm that is strong: without nerve-force it 
 cannot raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. Whence the 
 nerve-force ? From the ganglionic gray cells of the spinal 
 cord and brain. And whence these little gray cells ? The 
 dear, stupid physiologist has now reached his limit, and 
 you can confidently answer for him that it was Life created 
 these things, Life that existed before muscles, nerves, and 
 cells, and that slowly fashioned them ; Life, an order of 
 existence in no imaginable way analogous to, or to be 
 confounded with, matter or mechanics. There is in the 
 history of thought no more ludicrous and dismal failure 
 than the attempt to explain life in terms of mechanics. The 
 hope of the materialist that science would prove his preju- 
 dice is torn to tatters. The children of the spirit are 
 amazed at the bat-blind inability to see the fact, to see 
 that life is more certain and enduring than matter, soul 
 than sense. The organs of the body are changed, diseased, 
 die; the body itself dies; generations of bodies die, but 
 like a containing cord of silk, on which all the glittering
 
 IMMORTALITY. 367 
 
 beads of flesh are strung, there is the soul, the life, ever the 
 same, persisting unchanged through all change, giving 
 unity to diversity, molding, making, discarding, choosing, 
 healing, working to far-away ends with blind, and dead, 
 and obstinate materials. You love the flesh over-much, 
 and jealous life says to you, " Take it then, this so loved 
 and wondrous flesh ; me you have not loved," and lo ! 
 the dead body, useless, decaying, lies before you. Let no 
 materialistic misreading of science hoodwink you into any 
 blurring of the outlines between matter and life.* The 
 two are as far apart as heaven and earth, are as dissimilar 
 as thought can conceive, perhaps, in a final analysis, are 
 the only two things of the universe. There is no fact of 
 science showing the faintest warrant for confounding the 
 two. Even Huxley calls materialism the most baseless of 
 all dogmas. It will probably be found that there is but 
 one element, of which all others are duplications and com- 
 binations, atoms being but centers of force. But life is 
 irresolvable into any form of matter or mechanical energy. 
 It is not only unthinkable that matter could originate life, 
 but it is demonstrably absurd. No scientist to-day believes 
 in spontaneous generation. Omne vivum ex vivo is an 
 axiom. The plant has no nervous system and yet has 
 every physiologic function possessed by the human body. 
 It has contractility, irritability, respiration, anabolism, cata- 
 bolism, and reproductivity, that is, it has spontaneous 
 movement, it responds to stimulation, it breathes, it assimi- 
 lates, it excretes, it begets its like, and physiologically 
 this is all you can do. Nay, more than this, even a drop 
 of the jelly-like protoplasm that makes up the basis of all 
 cell-structures, animal or vegetable, has also all of these 
 
 * Those who think this view is the voice of faith and not of true science 
 may profitably read a little book that has come to my notice since writing these 
 pages, " Life Theories and Religious Thought," by Lionel S. Beale.
 
 368 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 qualities or powers. There are bundles of wholly struc- 
 tureless, unorganized jelly that exhibit these capacities in 
 a wonderful degree. There is, for instance, Hydra viridis, 
 that has no eyes and yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet 
 lies in wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees from 
 danger. Turned inside out, it lives and digests its food as 
 well as before. It holds live worms down with an impro- 
 vised arm when they try to get out of its stomach. Any 
 part reproduces all. Cut off the bottom of its stomach and 
 it goes on eating, quite untroubled by the little accident, 
 and so on. A great, wise, blind man has defined evolution, 
 or life, as the integration of matter and the dissipation of 
 motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, 
 incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogene- 
 ity, and during which the motion undergoes a parallel 
 transformation. Some one else improved upon this by 
 saying that it was " a change from a no-howish, untalka- 
 boutable all-alikeness, to a some-howish and in general 
 talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous something- 
 elsifications and all-togetherations." Schelling said that 
 life was the tendency to individuation. But the crystal or 
 the planet shows that, and they are not living. As the 
 hand cannot grasp itself, neither can life define itself. All 
 definitions I have seen miss the essential and primal char- 
 acteristics of spontaneous movement. But all definitions 
 begin by begging the question, assuming the thing ex- 
 plained. The truth is that there is no definition or expla- 
 nation possible. The dualism of matter and life must be 
 accepted. There is no monism can bridge the gulf between 
 mechanics and life. Inorganic matter with its inherent 
 forces and laws cannot be conceived as ever coming into or 
 as passing out of existence. From all eternity it was as it 
 is, and so it will remain. The physical universe shows no 
 hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no trace of intelli- 
 gence, no suggestion of a maker or God. It has no power
 
 IMMORTALITY. 369 
 
 of choice, no spontaneous motion. But the merest speck 
 of living matter is utterly and absolutely different- It may 
 have eyes or no eyes and yet it sees, ears or not and yet it 
 hears, nerves or not and yet it feels and reacts, brain or not 
 and yet it thinks and plans, and acts in accordance with 
 intellectual resolves. The dead body of your child is most 
 inconceivably different from the living body of an hour ago. 
 The one fundamental mystery of the explainable world is 
 why life seeks objectification in material forms, and why it 
 seeks it with such vehemence and ardor. Life seems to 
 bite at matter as if with famishing hunger. One wonders 
 if from some other planet life is being suddenly starved out 
 or banished by some catastrophe, and as a consequence 
 there is thence an over-emigration of the hungry Huns 
 upon our earth. Certain confused and confusion-breeding 
 philosophers in the interests of a theoretic monism or 
 pantheism pretend to find or to believe that the organic is 
 born out of the inorganic, that the physical world shows 
 evidence of design, that life and mentality were implicate 
 and latent in preexistent matter. Yet they will accept the 
 evidence against spontaneous generation derived from the 
 fact that if you kill all organic life by intense heat and then 
 exclude life from without you will never find life to arise. 
 But it is plain that in the condensation of the dust of space 
 into suns and planets all organic life was killed in the hottest 
 of all conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life appears. 
 It must have come from without, and must therefore be an 
 universal self-existent power. Why, or how, or whence 
 life comes to us we do not know now, but the transcendent 
 miracle is ever before our eyes : infinitely rich and free, life 
 is filling, thrilling, surcharging every molecule of matter to 
 which with wondrous power and ingenuity it can gain 
 access. It covers every thousandth of an inch of the 
 earth's surface, dives into the deepest ocean depths, fills the 
 air as high as the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, ever 
 32
 
 370 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 grasping up a million million renaissant forms, never rest- 
 ing, never baffled. Before this omnipresent god one stands 
 in rapt amazement and worship. To matter, then, life first 
 brought, and still ever brings, the power of organization, of 
 adaptation, of spontaneous energy, and of movement. But 
 when the death of the organization takes place, the life that 
 preceded and formed it is not lessened or affected. When 
 the watch wears out does it prove that the watchmaker is 
 dead ? It is more rational to suppose that the watchmaker 
 has kept on with his work, that he has made and will make 
 many more watches, and I therefore judge that the life of 
 each of us, that existed before our bodies, that formed our 
 bodies, will still form other bodies after ours. The Oriental 
 doctrine of the transmigration of souls is not to be accepted 
 in its crude details, but it is doubtless a great truth. It is 
 more rational and more consonant with what we know of 
 life, than the theory of wasted life implicate in the barbaric 
 notion of sending numberless millions of souls to hell to do 
 nothing but suffer useless pain, and other millions to heaven 
 to suffer (I use the word advisedly) useless pleasure. Any 
 theory of immortality that rests upon the assumption of 
 uselessness and waste may be quickly set aside. Just as 
 matter and force are indestructible, various forms of force 
 being interchangeable, so it must be with life. There must 
 be a conservation of life-energy just as rigid, and this truth 
 must remake and remold the whole conception of immor- 
 tality. When a mechanic force disappears in one phase, it 
 at once reappears in another aspect. So vegetable, animal, 
 and mental life are but different aspects of life-force, and 
 suffer no loss when transformed one into the other, or when 
 the body disappears altogether. And as it is the inherent 
 nature of force never to rest, so there is no rest for life. 
 Banishment of life to a heaven of inaction is as impossible 
 as it is absurd. 
 
 This extension of the law of the conservation of force to
 
 IMMORTALITY. 371 
 
 things biologic and psychic is a two-edged sword : it offers 
 conclusive evidence of the fallacy of the materialist and 
 believer. There is no annihilation ; your life, at death, not 
 only may not stop but cannot stop. Life is as inextin- 
 guishable as physical force. On the other hand, this 
 sword deals the death blow to two equally shallow fallacies 
 of believers. Just so sure as it insures the preservation of 
 your life, of all that is worth preservation, just so sure it 
 denies the possibility of preserving what was bound up 
 with and produced by organization, that is individuality 
 and personal identity. These things, if not entirely, are 
 certainly largely the products of your peculiar physical 
 and physiologic organization. Whatever is born of the 
 flesh must perish with the flesh ; what is born of the spirit 
 shall inherit eternal life. But the profoundest and most 
 distinguishing rebuke is given the unscientific, puerile, sel- 
 fish assumption of the waste, loss, and uselessness of life 
 involved in the old theory of heaven and hell. When from 
 a chemic compound you take away and liberate one ele- 
 ment or compound radicle, does it then shoot off into 
 space, to " flock all by itself" for eternity ? By no means ! 
 It at once rushes into a new combination with its nearest 
 neighbor, quickly picking up again the round of its duty 
 and function. The curious notion that after having done 
 work in one body, life or souls should at once rush off to 
 some far-away star, there to sing or howl for eternity, was 
 a childish absurdity. One wonders where even an omni- 
 potent God could get material for such an amazing manu- 
 facture and loss of souls. The theory also forgot that logic 
 demands that what should live forever in the future must 
 perforce have lived forever in the past. A rope, if it have 
 one end, must have two ends. What, therefore, have our 
 souls been doing during the past eternity ? The truth is that, 
 absolutely speaking, there cannot be souls, but only soul. 
 Life is a unit, and indivisible. The tiniest bit of bioplasm
 
 372 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 holds and represents all of life. Neither you nor it are separ- 
 able from the whole. There may be education and progres- 
 sive evolution of life as a whole, but there can be no indi- 
 vidual and selfish salvation apart from the salvation of all 
 other souls. The idea that release from the body at once 
 releases a soul from action, duty, and the work of life, is an 
 illogicality that could have arisen in no mind conversant 
 with the demonstrated law of the nonwastage of force in 
 any work of energy elsewhere. Life is never tired ; it is 
 the body that requires rest, not the spirit. The old doc- 
 trine of heaven, an eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the 
 sluggish flesh whipped to ceaseless work by the unresting 
 life. The desire of heaven was the desire of eternal death. 
 This extension of the idea of the nonwastage, the rigid 
 conservation and interconvertibility of force to things of 
 life, gains a new significance and grandeur when we con- 
 sider that whatever proves the immortality of man proves 
 the immortality of every other animal or vegetable form. 
 The tree and horse have a soul quite as well as you, and 
 must live after death quite as surely as you will. It is the 
 flimsiest of conceits that makes men think they are en- 
 dowed with a special sort of soul or divine life, different 
 from that of animals or plants. Don't flatter yourself. 
 God takes quite the same loving pains and care in the 
 elimination of a leaf that he does of a brain-cell. Man is 
 but a small part of the animal world, and the whole animal 
 world is but a small part of the total life of the globe. 
 Don't despise the vegetable kingdom : it can do something 
 you cannot do make living matter out of mineral sub- 
 stances. You could not live a day without the food fur- 
 nished you by " your brothers, the plants." Hence if 
 human life or souls cannot be sent off into space to do 
 nothing, neither can the souls of animals and plants. If 
 we are to have our heaven, they must have theirs also. 
 Does not this tangential theory begin to be clumsy and
 
 IMMORTALITY. 373 
 
 work with huge creakings and difficulties ? It looks like 
 reductio ad absurdum. 
 
 Not only is the tangential theory contradictory of all 
 physical analogies and all known laws, but it is positively 
 immoral, it is but a refined selfishness. Worldliness is 
 none the less sinful because it is other-worldliness. If bil- 
 lions of souls could thus be wasted in an eternity of useless 
 pain or pleasure, could thus drunken with individuation 
 hug their own sweet ghosts for never-ending time, then 
 were life a farce, the universe a huge, meaningless machine 
 for grinding out waste and useless souls. But if all life, 
 past or future, is one and indivisible, purposive, educational, 
 then the world becomes full of meaning and the face of the 
 Father, Life, smiles out at us from every living thing. The 
 faith of all good men that goodness is at the heart of things 
 is justified. The Earth becomes our home, that we can 
 love ; our Father ever dwelleth here ; we cannot be ban- 
 ished. When we have finished our task, when our body 
 has worn out, tireless life, of which we are the children and 
 heirs, gives us here and now other work to do. 
 
 To matter, this tremendous cosmical game of incarnation 
 can mean nothing. We see the dead flesh break up into 
 simpler chemic forms and the atoms finally spin off un- 
 altered by their flesh-dance, again to be caught up by the 
 mystic and unseen Master, again to be pressed into organic 
 forms, forms that like empty seashells only show where 
 life has been. And so on forever. But to life some edu- 
 cative purpose must be operative through it all. Life that 
 made eyes must see more than eyes; life that made brains 
 must know more than brains. There is, doubtless, pain and 
 strain ; but is there to be no ultimate justification ? We 
 may catch glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an increase 
 both of quantity and quality of life in geologic times ? Is 
 life trying to do away with death and heredity ? Are they 
 but makeshifts, death but a discarding of too obstinate
 
 374 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 material ? birth but a retempering and reworking of the 
 same material ? heredity but the temporary means of 
 passing life and its experiences onward until death and 
 birth shall be found unnecessary in a growing command of 
 chemic and physical forces that shall banish old age out 
 of the world ? There is no inherent reason why a body 
 should grow decrepit. If it can be made to preserve its 
 suppleness for fifty years, why not for a thousand ? It may 
 transpire that the dream of an elixir of life may come true 
 through scientific progress despite the savage death-blow 
 given it by Brown-Sequard. The more sin, selfishness, 
 and wrong there is, the shorter is the average length of 
 human lives. If you will look into the rich and awful 
 science of statistics you will find proof of this in every 
 class of society. When we apply ourselves to enrich and 
 lengthen our life-time with the same zeal we now use in 
 killing each other, when the endowments of the world's 
 scientific schools equal the cost of the world's armies, 
 then there will be a very different life-table found in the 
 insurance offices. 
 
 Finally, with mournful, echoing recurrence comes the old 
 question : How much of individuality persists and passes 
 untouched through death's fingers? How far does the 
 graduate life carry with it the results of experience ? I 
 would answer : All that you ought to desire, all that is best, 
 all that you will want when you fully understand how 
 little and poor is individuality and that there is something 
 including it and far better. I have a strange inability, 
 personally, to understand the, to me, absurd hunger after 
 personal identity. It appears to me a childish obtuseness 
 of character. The great and glorious freeness and large- 
 ness of life, the decentralized, impersonal quality of it, 
 seems to be unappreciated. I do not see how people can 
 fail to understand that personal identity is not only impos- 
 sible, does not exist now and here, but that the desire of
 
 IMMORTALITY. 375 
 
 it is the renunciation of progress. We grow and advance 
 only by change, only by breaking up identity and becoming 
 other. Think also of the lack of identity or individuality 
 in nature. There is no personality and individualism there, 
 and yet there is something that includes personality and 
 is much more. There is will, consciousness, intelligence, 
 life, but not identity or individuality. So the life that is 
 the heart of us invites us to leave our little self and find a 
 larger self. Religion is our yes to that invitation. Mate- 
 rialism and pessimism is the saying no to it. The immor- 
 tality that is alone possible or desirable is the losing our 
 life, the individual identity-loving life, again to find it as 
 the impersonal but richer, deeper life of nature and God. 
 God denies you an immortality of individualism and 
 identity because He loves you so well that He refuses you 
 your crude, childish desire in order to offer you something 
 infinitely better. People do not seem to see how narrow, 
 small, and partial is the dissociate speck of the individual, 
 and that as an individual progresses in all the virtues of 
 character he evermore becomes proportionally less indi- 
 vidual and less centralized, always more like the divine 
 prototype of his impersonal father, Life. The love of in- 
 dividualism is the love of imperfection. This may to some 
 seem a hard doctrine. It is not perhaps an easy task for 
 the butterfly to break its way out through the million-fold 
 bonds of its cocoon, but when risen into the large air and 
 sunshine does it regret the birth-struggle? They who 
 think they are being cheated of reality for a metaphysic 
 illusion will find, in breaking through the bonds of flesh, 
 that they also have brought with them splendid wings for 
 rising in the no less real but rarer air of spiritual trust in 
 life. It is not that we love less the thousand ties of flesh, 
 home, and kindred, but that in recognizing the paternity 
 and fraternity of all life, we find love commensurate with 
 that life. I do not think there was any cold, stony harsh-
 
 376 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 ness in the face of Jesus when He uttered those most pro- 
 foundly significant of all words, " Who is my mother, and 
 who are my brethren ? Whosoever shall do the will of 
 my Father, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." 
 What a recall to the common life of the spirit ! What 
 unity with the common life based upon loving obedience 
 to the will of the Father. What a wonderful rebuke of 
 the love of individualism. He did not love His mother 
 less, but humanity more. The more we rise into that im- 
 personal atmosphere the more are we careless of the fate 
 of personal identity. The composite photograph shows 
 the fundamental and enduring quality, the average feature. 
 In a certain sense life and history are taking humanity's 
 composite photograph ; but, inordinately loving individ- 
 ualism, each sitter conceitedly demands that his own 
 picture be left untouched and unblurred by that of the 
 others, and that his poor little portrait shall stand alone 
 and forever precisely what the divine Photographer does 
 not wish and will not permit. Obstinacy persists and God 
 smashes the negative to the ground with the unanswerable 
 argument called death. Because it is more than metaphor 
 that in many ways the body may be likened unto a photog- 
 rapher's negative, created, for example, by the in-flashing 
 of a heavenly ray of light among the highly unstable 
 chemicals of matter ; useless, except as an intermediate 
 step to a clearer showing of the character; black and in- 
 visible, unless shone through by the pure light of life and 
 love ; fragile as glass, and lastly, the poor, weak, shadowy, 
 dead counterfeit of a throbbing, marvelous, living reality. 
 The hunger for an immortality of the body, of the senses, 
 the lust of immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only 
 comparable to the mania of a crazy photographer interested 
 only in his negatives, and who never " develops " one ; or 
 to the foolishness that values photographs more than the 
 friends themselves. If we once get our spiritual eye fixed
 
 IMMORTALITY. 377 
 
 upon the deep reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veil- 
 ings of individuality and flesh, the cravings of our weak 
 hearts for eternal continuance of our little bundle of little- 
 nesses would fall away from us as softly as the wayward 
 longings of childhood. We could then see that it is the 
 quality of all life, the progressive purity, power, and in- 
 crease of life in the abstract, that become all-important. 
 Religion would become the love and veneration of Life 
 the Father of us ; morality the cheerful obedience of the 
 individual to that Father ; Heaven the reentrance of the 
 individual life into the great unity. Much of the old 
 religion was irreligious ; its God a far-away, dead abstrac- 
 tion, not a living, ever-present love ; its immortality was at 
 heart a desire for death, its spiritualism at heart a barbaric 
 materialism. To this death of faith and irreligious religion 
 comes the sympathetic study and love of nature that is, 
 science and reveals to us the opulence of life, the infinity 
 of intellect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her resources 
 and of her diversity, her beauty and her splendor. The 
 old materialistic degradation of religion forefelt its doom 
 would come from this spiritualistic revivification, and the 
 devotees cried out against science as atheistic. And science 
 found some foolish enemies in her own camp who, mis- 
 reading their divine book, joined in the cry " Nothing 
 but mechanics." It was a dismal, short-lived croak. We 
 now see that not only are science and her workers religious, 
 but without scientific knowledge there can be no adequate 
 idea or practice of religion. You can't love God unless 
 you love and know what He is doing in this universe. The 
 man who in a walk goes neglectfully and obliviously by a 
 million mysteries and wonders that God has been toiling 
 to eliminate for ages, such a man cannot lay much claim 
 to God's friendship. If we love our friend, we have some 
 interest in the deepest concern of his life. The foolishest 
 of all fears is the fear that science is somehow going to
 
 378 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 destroy all good things of faith and life. In truth, it reveals 
 all good things. It demonstrates and manifests both God 
 and immortality, God as the Father of all life, immortality 
 as the surety of the conservation and nonwastage of that 
 life. Much of the fear of science is, as I have said, the 
 fear of the old materialistic religion in presence of the 
 larger faith that burns up its beloved errors. They who 
 had been promised and had argued themselves into a 
 groundless belief in the value and immortality of a bundle 
 of sensual appetites, selfish desires, and imperfections, saw 
 far in advance that any large study of life and nature would 
 dash their wretched faith to atoms. And science has over- 
 ridden this unfaithful faith. "He that soweth to his flesh 
 shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he that soweth to 
 the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." This is 
 as true scientifically as it is true morally and religiously. 
 
 It required but a little study of neurology and psy- 
 chology to give demonstration to this truth. The products 
 of organization die with disorganization. Most, if not all, 
 of what people mean by individuality and personal iden- 
 tity is a product of organization, is an accident of incar- 
 nation. Children are similar to each other ; they are 
 lovable partly because idiosyncrasy and individualism 
 haven't yet developed. As we grow older we cultivate 
 individuality, until the very old are usually angular, cranky, 
 individual with a vengeance! Death, thank heaven! is the 
 end of that, the certainty of a noneternalizing of the imper- 
 fect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation and reincarnation 
 are the ever-renewed work of Life. Through the laws of 
 heredity, through physiology, sociology, and biology, 
 science is tirelessly illustrating to us how all life holds 
 together, how individualism is valueless, and sacrificed to 
 the common weal. There is no escape, sensual or super- 
 sensual, from the world's great common life. The old, 
 selfish dream of a heaven apart from incarnation, from
 
 IMMORTALITY. 379 
 
 doing and becoming, was a pitiful mistake. You cannot 
 clutch your cake of happiness and like a spoiled child run 
 into the attic of heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it 
 that you do not slip off. And if you have been born again 
 of the Spirit you will have no such desire, but will beg for 
 kindred work upon the old earth-home. 
 
 In the meantime the conclusion is clear : to love and aid 
 the work of our master Life we need not wait for death. 
 We may not seek our own salvation ; it is no matter 
 whether you and I are saved or not. The reincarnation of 
 life is our work here and now. It took you twenty years 
 to fashion out of a microscopically small speck of unor- 
 ganized protoplasm your body and brain. Within us we 
 are to keep that organization from cramping and binding 
 the life, keep life as large and free and pliant as possible. 
 Outside of us the incarnation goes on as well, and every 
 person you influence either for good or for ill, thus by the 
 fact becomes a product of your incarnating work. Every 
 day you have a hundred opportunities to give, without les- 
 sening your own supply, some of your own life, to increase 
 the quantity and to elevate the quality of the general stock 
 of the world's life. Help the young ; they inherit the world 
 and will use it well or ill according to your teaching and 
 example. Stop cruelty to animals ; they are your brothers, 
 rilled with the same life as your own. Fight the political ruin 
 we are preparing for ourselves by partisanship, bribery, and 
 class-legislation. Discourage war and intemperance, and 
 lessen the tyranny of the strong and wealthy. Wage a 
 ceaseless war to the death against luxury, the poison that 
 is eating and rotting the hearts of all of us. Love trees, 
 meadows, clear brooks, the mountains, and silences of 
 Nature. Love, not so much your own or another's indiv- 
 idual life, as Life itself. There is otherwise no immortality. 
 
 The divine story tells us that after measureless suffering 
 and self-purification, Buddha had gained the right to enter
 
 380 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 Nirvana. With compassion filling his heart he put his 
 merited reward aside and resolved to remain without to 
 teach and to help until every child of earth should have 
 become his disciple, and until every disciple should have 
 entered Nirvana before him. Such must be the resolve of 
 every true lover of life and of every right seeker after 
 immortality.
 
 The Meaning and The Method of Life. 
 
 A SEARCH FOR RELIGION IN BIOLOGY. 
 
 BY GEORGE M. GOULD, A.M., M.D. 
 
 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893. 297 Pages. Price, $1.75. 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 
 
 In strong contrast to all this is the genuine biologist's religion set forth by 
 Dr. Gould in the book before us. To begin with, it is truly a religion, and no 
 sham. Whoever believes anything like it must, no doubt, be filled with the 
 spirit, if not of worship, yet of devotion, hearty, tender, and passionate ; and for 
 how many confessions can we say as much ? Next, whether we accept the doc- 
 trine or not, we cannot but grant that it does truly spring, by methods of thought 
 analogous to those of natural philosophy, out of observations of nature. Insist- 
 ing upon the absolute distinction between living and lifeless things, Dr. Gould 
 sees in the former an invisible Life, purposeful and intelligent. This is his God. 
 He names him Biologos. He is a regular Aryan nature-god, very wise and 
 clever, but existing in nature, not the creator of matter, and very far from 
 being omnipotent. 
 
 Dr. Gould believes in his God without one shade of doubt, and with a fervid 
 joy that would render his book delightful reading even if it were not filled with 
 interesting suggestions gracefully and strikingly expressed. He really makes 
 his doctrine decidedly attractive, at least for some of our moods. 
 
 It is little to say that there must be some truth in Dr. Gould's idea if there 
 is any truth in religion ; for every religion worthy the name represents a struggle 
 between the God and some dark and baleful resistance. The Nation. 
 
 It is this directness of experience, this presence of a truly passionate interest 
 in the subject, which makes our author's work fascinating, and which ought to 
 make it valuable for many who will not accept Dr. Gould's conclusions in his 
 own form. These conclusions, as here stated, are embodied, indeed, rather in 
 an excellent cosmical romance than in a reasoned philosophical doctrine. But 
 cosmical romances are works of art that few can write, and the good cosmical 
 romance is a fiction that is sure to veil a deeper truth than perhaps its own author 
 imagines, especially if he himself takes his legend to be literally accurate. 
 
 In setting himself this task our author appears as one well equipped with 
 empirical illustrations derived from the biological sciences. His acquaintance 
 with a considerable mass of them is as close and fresh as his own inner experi- 
 ence of life. It need not be said, however, that this empirical material is here 
 used, not technically, nor in the service of science for its own sake, but rather
 
 382 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 
 
 by way of illustrating the general cosmical hypothesis. The latter, meanwhile, 
 is itself presented with all the naive and charming immediacy of a divine intui- 
 tion. One does not prove this intuition ; one simply sees its truth. 
 
 Our author is, above all, ethical in his concern, and feels precisely that 
 opposition between the ethical and the all-powerful characteristics in the God of 
 tradition which has so divided in twain the religious consciousness of the ages. 
 The worth of the present intuition lies, then, in the fruits that spring from it. 
 And there is something delightful, as one reads Dr. Gould's glowing pages, in 
 watching this fervent student of current medical and of general biological lore, 
 who, inspired by a moral devotion, " sees," " under the microscope," the work- 
 ings of a God whom he now has to conceive with attributes quite pathetically, 
 yes, tragically, human. 
 
 The air of what we have called " unique experience " in this volume can 
 be but faintly suggested by such a review. These propounders of intuitions 
 will always be welcome guests in philosophy. Professor Josiah Royce, of 
 Harvard University, in the International Journal of Ethics. 
 
 We differ from the author so radically in one of his most important philoso- 
 phic premises, we agree with him so heartily in his ethical conclusions, and, 
 moreover, we admire so sincerely his earnest, whole-souled, vigorous style, his 
 reality and loftiness of purpose, that our critical faculty is paralyzed. 
 
 In the living cell, the finite, powerful, but not all-powerful God, whom Dr. 
 Gould terms Biologos (/3/of, life; /W;of, the world), becomes incarnate. In every 
 living cell is God bodily present, and slowly, painfully through the ages, Life 
 struggles with matter; sympathy, pity, love, struggle with the mechanical regu- 
 larity of the inanimate universe. 
 
 Biologos gains for himself new footholds, he advances from " strength to 
 strength," as higher forms of life appear. At last, man, the nearest approach to 
 God, is evolved, and every man becomes God's deputy to push his conquests over 
 matter further, and finally to establish his kingdom of love. Evil exists, not 
 because God wills it, but because God's power to prevent it is limited. Or, 
 rather, evil is the result of the imperfections of the development of the creatures 
 of Biologos; it is but another name for the obstacles unconquered; the obstacles 
 inherent in dead, mechanically-governed matter. 
 
 From this and other scientific data, interestingly and forcibly set forth, the 
 author develops a practical creed of highest value. We are all the sons of God, 
 all His servants to conquer evil. Life is real and holy ; its method is given by 
 science, its meaning by a direct inspiration from Biologos. The author vigorously 
 denounces all forms of selfishness, cruelty, pretense, and hypocrisy, and shows 
 wherein lies the true, noble, sincere, and loving use of God's gifts. Sympathy 
 with and respect for all other life are its foundations. 
 
 To the thousands who, like the author, find traditional roads impassable, his 
 book will doubtless be a comfort and an inspiration. To all, it will prove a 
 source of spiritual elevation ; for it breathes an immediate consciousness of 
 God's existence, rare indeed in our modern literature. The American Hebrew. 
 
 A very active-minded and suggestive work. The author seems to have 
 passed through a prolonged period of atheistic thought, and to have worked 
 his way out by great mental suffering to a vision of God in all life. His style is 
 vigorous and clear, his observation is close and connected, and his views are 
 decidedly original. Public Opinion, Washington, D. C. 
 
 The ability and sincerity of the author will yet commend his volume most 
 to the most philosophic minds, who incline to believe agnosticism as far from 
 the truth as gnosticism. The Literary World, Boston.
 
 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 383 
 
 We consider it an important contribution to the scientist-theological litera- 
 ture of the day. The Bookseller, London. 
 
 The writer seeks to give the key-note to the riddle of life. The peculiarities, 
 course, accidents, and evils of life he seeks to explain. In many respects the 
 idea sought to be established is the same as that wrought out by Drummond in 
 his work on God in the material world. Each takes the phenomena of the 
 world as observed, and shows how a divine power works through the observed 
 material to attain the ends to be accomplished. 
 
 Perhaps the chapter on cytology, or theology of the cell, will attract most 
 medical minds. Cell physiology and pathology are accepted as fundamental 
 elements of medicine. 
 
 The work will interest all who desire to increase their knowledge as to the 
 meaning of life. American Lancet. 
 
 In every chapter much will be found to help the willing soul longing to be 
 free so as to know God, aware that in this knowledge is perfect freedom, and 
 unaware that He Himself is in us, of us, and about us for " in Him we live 
 and move and have our being." Book News, Phila. 
 
 The volume is an acceptable contribution to the solution of the problem of 
 life. It is deserving of careful examination, and may confirm many a mind in 
 the same grooves of thought which his chapters in some respects clearly set 
 forth. The Transcript, Boston. 
 
 About the earnestness, the high ethical purpose, and the great ability, on his 
 own lines, of the author of this remarkable work there can be no question. 
 The Christian World, England. 
 
 Its motto, " From life, through life, to life," gives the key-note of its tone 
 one of cheer and encouragement a refreshing contrast to the philosophy of 
 pessimism and despair, so prevalent for many years past in works assuming to 
 be guides of scientific thought. 
 
 One of the greatest merits and clearness of the book is its manly and vigorous 
 protest against the crying evils of the age its rampant materialism, its suicidal 
 love of luxury, gross sensualism, ever-increasing inefficiency and self-indulgence. 
 
 We hail it as an omen of good in our future progress toward the light an 
 important link in the chain of evidence binding earth to heaven. We would 
 urge the intelligent and earnest general reader not to be deterred by the technical 
 phraseology of many of its passages from a careful perusal of the entire work. 
 It will amply repay him for the effort. It will leave the impress for good on 
 both heart and mind, enlarging the views and broadening one's sympathies 
 with all things stamped with the image of the all-loving p'ather. The Times, 
 Richmond, Va. 
 
 It is a work worth careful study, and while at a cursory glance it may 
 appear dull, one has only to read a few pages to realize the wealth of thought 
 contained between its covers. The Herald, Rochester, N. Y. 
 
 Dr. Gould's work is a sincere and enthusiastic endeavor to bring vividly 
 before the mind the evidencesof God's existence and the method of His activity 
 apparent in the world of living things. He takes for his mottoes, " From life, 
 through life, to life," and " the Word became flesh," of which this volume 
 attempts to be an exposition. 
 
 In attempting thus to indicate the spiritual principles underlying the world 
 of nature, Dr. Gould's book maybe considered as in some sense a counterpart 
 to Drummond's exposition of the natural law in the spiritual world. The 
 Press, Burlington, Vt.
 
 384 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 
 
 At the present moment there is no question of a purely theoretic character 
 which so profoundly agitates thinkers as that which has reference to a recon- 
 ciliation of the traditional faiths of mankind with the startling revelations of 
 scientific investigation ; and Dr. Gould deserves sincere thanks for the able and 
 scholarly way in which he here meets the issue and clears the ground of en- 
 cumbering side questions and logical impediments. 
 
 Dr. Gould speaks as a scientist, but always as one whose ear has been sen- 
 sitive to the still, small voices of nature, no less than to the utterances of her 
 unalterable laws. The Bulletin, Phila. 
 
 The book is one of deep thought, the product of unwearied study of life 
 itself and the most intense and genuine conviction, and will well repay the 
 reader. Book News, Phila. 
 
 These somewhat startling theories will doubtless expose the author to acrid 
 criticism; but they should acquit him of the sin of mental plagiarism, for they 
 are the unique product of his own brain. That circumstance, however, should 
 not deter the reader from dipping into the book, because, though it is full of 
 strange conceits, it contains much that is suggestive and interesting. The author 
 is plainly a man who has brought to bear a cultivated intelligence and a 
 thoughtful and inquiring mind on the problems of the here and the hereafter. 
 New York Tribune. 
 
 It is a matter for congratulation that here and there is to be found a man 
 who will put aside his desire for the fame that the many might give him, and 
 seek for his reward in the appreciation of the few. Dr. Gould has studied the 
 facts before him in his search for religion in biology, and has written a really 
 entertaining book. Post, Chicago. 
 
 When the reader has got through with this book he will admit that Dr. 
 Gould has not made his search for religion in the realm of biology wholly in 
 vain. For apologetic purposes the work will be found highly useful. New 
 York Christian at Work. 
 
 Dr. Gould has attempted to discover the secret of nature and of human life. 
 He brings to the task intelligence and skill. We have read his argument with 
 sympathetic interest, and, although it seems to us inadequate, it has a peculiar 
 poetic power of fascination. The argument tends toward the faith of optimism ; 
 and, although it leaves us with a dualism that cannot be resolved into unity, it 
 is in the direction of a sane and sound explanation of the universe. The Chris- 
 tian Register. 
 
 His work is evidently sincere, the result of persistent study and the effort of 
 a candid and truthful mind. His volume is an indication of the longing every- 
 where evident to reconcile the essentials of the old faith with new knowledge ; 
 if the effort is incoherent it is at least resolute and genuine, and deserves the 
 consideration that should always be accorded to honest endeavor. The 
 National Baptist, Philadelphia. 
 
 The work is that of a writer who knows his own mind and has no hesitation 
 in combating received opinions which seem to him erroneous. It is a scholarly, 
 incisive work. Detroit Free Press. 
 
 We recognize the abilty and learning, the sincerity and suggestiveness, of 
 the volume. Zion's Herald.
 
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