1.2 HEALTH AND HAPPINESS. E.G. Dru Drury, M.D., B.S. D.P.H.pdf

186 soutH AFRICAN MEDICAL RECORD. MAY 10.
getting a warm welcome from the local medical profession,
and, perhaps, from one or two institutions,
at Graham town one felt that the whole city was
welcoming us, and it was a pleasant thing to realize.
Our Grahamstown confreres carried out all the
Congre s arrangement excellently, and nothing- was
lacking a regards the comfort of the vi itors. The
marvel to all was how it was all done. It is a comparatively
simple thing to entertain a Congress in a
large place where there is a large medical
personnel among. t whom the various duties can be
divided, where the men who are doing the work have
colleagues who will relieve them temporarily of their
practice responsibilities, and where a large proportion
are specialists or officials upon whom those responsibilities
do not fall so heavily as upon the general
practitioner, but it i widely different in a small town
with a mere handful of practitioners. However, they
did it, and did it as well as we have ever known done
before. Especial thanks are due to the President
and Secretary. The .former had a most laudably
extensive conception of his duties, apparently personally
looking after the smallest details, and being
almost everywhere at every time. There was never
a hitch anywhere.
The papers read were distinctly good, although the
discussions were somewhat disappointing. But they
are more or less so at all Congresses, and it seems to
pass the wit of man to make them anything else.
In this connection we must venture on our only
criticism. We think it was a proceeding of doubtful
,'visdom to substitute Sectional Presidential Addresses
on subjects selected by the Organizing Committee for
the Special Discussions which have been a feature of
the last two Congres es. To have one subject selected
by the CommiHee and marked out as a piece de Tesistance
is, to our mind, an excellent thing, but in the
first place, we think, it should be carefully viewed as
a discussion, and the opening should be a mere opening,
not a paper, for otherwise the great desideratum
of a good discussion will never be attained, and, in
the second, we do not think it should be entrusted
to the President of the Section. It does not by any
means follow that a gentleman who has the highest
claims to the honour of being a Sectional President
is able to read a good paper or a good opening to a
discussion on a particular subject selected for him.
Indeed, strictly speaking, no discussion should be
allowed on any address given by any President, for
the very good reason that it is a most invidious thing
for any man to preside over a discussion, perhaps to
closure that di cussion or some of the speakers at it,
when the paper is his own. Vie think that the best
plan yet adopted is that obtaining at the J ohannesburg
Congress, of a "Special Discussion," with a
selected opener whose contribution (which should
never assume the dimensions of a " paper") is circulated
beforehand.
But, with this small critici m, we have nought but
commendation for the Grahamstown' Congress, and
the deepest of gratitude for the good confreres and
their fellow-townsmen who made it such a pleasant
gathering.
'italtb anb 'iappintss.
By E. G. DRu DRURY, M.D., B.S.
(DURHAM).
(LOND.), D.P.H.
. (PTesidelltial Address at 19th SA. Medical
CongTess.)
SIR GEORGE
CORY,
It is my grateful duty to thank you for opening the
XIXth South African Medical Congress, and for your
address, which has charmed us, with its humorous
tales and its solid contribution to the medical history
of South Africa.
Though you may not deserve the title conferred
upon you by the M,a!nchesteT Guardian of the" Great
South African Industrial Magnate," we know you for
a great Sou,th African, pain taking in research, fearless
in championship of truth, and frank to abjure
error. You, Sir George, are beloved by us all, and if
we have one regret, it is that you are not amongst us
to-day as a medical man.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
In the name of Congress, I thank you for your
attendance to-day, and for the part which many of you
will play this week for the honour of our cities.
MEMBERS OF THIS COKGRESS,
In the name of your hosts, the Medical Societies
in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, and Grahamstown, 1
welcome you, and on their behalf do undertake that
no effort of ours shall be· wanting to help you to work
and to play. Matters of technical importance will be
laid before you at the formal meetings of Congress;
it is now my duty to address you as President.
An assemblage so variegated as this demands the
creation of an atmo. phere rather than accurate
report of facts; and, so, I ask your leave to speak in
the vulgar tongue of a matter of coml11on interest.
of health, of happiness, and of the relation which
obtains between them.
OF HEALTH.
You know that those potent prescriptions which we
write for the dispenser are headed by a cabalistic
symbol JJ.. By a modern gloss, this sign is held' to
be an abbreviation of the instruction" Recipe, take of
so and so," but it is an alchemical invocation of
Jupiter. It may have been fitting to invoke the

MAY 10. SOUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL RECORD. 187
thunderer before consuming a soul-perturbing bolus of
jalap, but a happier tradition makes doctors the servants
of .Apollo, the fleet-footed, light-dispensing Lord
of learnmg. "Th~ poets," wrote Franci Bacon of
Yerulam, " did well to conjoin music and medicine in
Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune
this curious harp of man's body, and reduce it to harmony."
We accept thi5 de cription of our profe ional aim
unreservedly; yet, as you look round on this body of
medical men anJ women, disciplined to cure quickly,
safely, and pleasantly-a cnrare cita, tute, et iu-cunde" I
-your memories may revive a contrasted scene. A
year ago the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Georae
was twice packed with some six hundred persons, co~fessedly
not well, who had collected to the piping of
a peripatetk healer. It was, to a lover of humanity,
a moving sf,ectacle. and, without a-ttempting to evaluate
its implicit doctrine that holiness makes for health,
or to trace the paths by which an idea emotionally
embraced. can influence the chemistry a~d physics o'f
the body. we are forced to ask why two such bodies of
people, (,f healers and unhealed, fail to help each other
infallibly. "Vhy does so much unresolved disharmony
of body exist? Rejecting the cheap gibe that the
healers are too full of knowledge to be wi e, there is a
twofol1 answer to this question. The reason of illhealth
is to be found either in the conditions under
which the curious harp of man's body has to give
forth Jts melody, or el e in the technique of the player
upon his instrument. In brief, there exist defective
publi..: health and faulty personal habits.
OF PUBLIC HEALTH. .
There is no need to elaborate the theme that surroundings
influence health, for you are all believers
or ratepayers, but you will admit that civilized man,
massed together in compact colonies, has not a burning
conviction of the importance of communal health.
To medical officer to a military camp would deny that
this is true of individuals; and, as regards the State,
it is easier to-day, eighty years after the foundations
of public health were laid by Chadwick, Simon and
others, to persuade the Treas}lry to part with money
for scab eradication or for Singapore than to grant
aid for medical research.
Suppose that, as a community, we determined to
guard ourselves against those prolific, lowly organisms
which, taking advantage of air, food, water, and
insect parasites, live an unnatural life at our expense,
so that there was an end to the preventable fevers

188 SOUTH AFRICA MEDICAL RECORD. MAY 10.
OF HAPPINESS.
The correlative of health or physical harmony is
happiness or mental harmony. By happiness must be
understood, not the pleasurable satisfaction of appetite,
nor the in tinctive avoidance of boredom, repression,
overwork, or pain, but a cu ·tomary state of joyousness,
mirthfulness, merriment, or, in an older world.
of hilarity. And the question which underlies this
address, and which justifies or stultifies our professional
activities, is, "Should we be happy if we
were healthy?" Does not our own speech, which
derives from a common stock the words health,
wholeness, wholesomeness, and holiness-does not that
very word sanitation, which implies anity, prepare us
to answer "Yes"? Health and happiness are not
identical, but clo ely partnered, as are foundation and
superstructure. Dr. Bridges, himself an alumnu of
Bart's, wrote in "The Birth of Love":
" Who builds a ship must first lay down the keel
Of health, whereto the ribs of mirth are wed."
How clearly experience demonstrate the inverse
relation of ill-health to unhappines! An
abscess under your tooth will spoil your form in a
game of chess. Lesser defects of health also
have their effect on happiness. Catarrh of the
nasal sinuses decreases the power to concentrate
on, say, Hegel's "Shorter Logic"; an
over-active thyroid gland makes your temper a
family trial; whilst the fermenting- presence of certain
bacterial flora in what Harold Mencken 1 call that
"thirty-foot v£,a tdolorosa running from the pylorus
to the sigmoid flexure" delays development in some
children and worries badly brought-up citizen. Now
worry and happiness will not work together, and the
curious may have noticed someone who was once preoccupied
with intestinal problems and, anxieties improve
in health and happiness on falling in love, taking
up Child Welfare work, or painting most primitive
pictures. For those abominable perverts who" enjoy
bad health," using its possession for a pedestal, and
its symptoms for a staple of cQnversation, the only
cure would be a ojourn in Samuel Butler's
"Erewhon," where physical ills were a title to penal
servitude; whilst the ghouls who sugge t that yOll
are looking rotten, or who retail the awful cases they
have known just like yours, can never be sufficiently
execrated.
It may be objected that men h~ve achieved good
work in spite of disease-witness the tuberculous
R. L. Stevenson; even immortal work, as did the
phthisical Keats. We are exhorted in places where they
sing that suffering makes for character, just as infection
may result in immunity. That it may do so is fine
testimony to the indomitable spirit in man, which resists
alike deformation of mind and of body. Yet,
we may hold that man would develop to a full-rounded
maturity under gentler goads than "the ting and
arrows of outrageous fortune." If it needs suffering
to call out our reserve of power, let us endure it
stoically, rather than be "tame in Earth's paddock
as her prize." Meanwhile we do know as physiologists
and as students of historical reforms that painful
stimuli are more potent than pleasurable ones. A
foozled drive, colic, jealousy, or provincial taxation
lead to more violent reactions than do a long put, a
dinner of herb' where love is, or a satisfactory
balance sheet. Granted that pain is pCl'll1tm, punishment
following on a sufficient breach of laws-of law~
not thundered from a mountain-topJ but found to
be inherent in the structure of thi curious harp-we
may regard pain as a schoolmaster from whom we
may have to learn, if we need the lesson.
THE SECRET OF
HAPPINESS.
Is there any secret of happiness? I believe that there
is, and, before sitting down, I shall offer for your
criticism a formula, which I trust you will not find
"neat, plausible, and wrong." For the moment I
.make confe sion of my faith, that in spite of the
anxieties which encompass Congress, life is an increasingly
happy adventure.
A biologist who wished to tudy happiness experimentally
would concentrate upon specimens of happy
people. Such a ,student would soon note that the
sources of happiness vary with the playing of the
successive acts of the human drama. Glance briefly
at the seven ages of man' "strange eventful history."
THE
INFANT.
Act I shows" the infant new to earth and sky." He
comes into life like a profiteer into society, a get-richquick
person of whose newly acquired organs only the
heart, liver, kidneys and a few nerve tracts have had
any rehearsals at all. At his peril he must play his
part without delay. His respiratory centre comes into
action like a roaring exhaust; his first es ays with Cl.
remarkably simple diet are tentative and unconvincing;
the limits within which his life can be carried on are
sharply defined.
The purposive urge, the "horme," of life has constructed
this infantile harp and set it down in the
universal ochestra to play its part, harmoniously if
it may be. At birth the creative impulse is prodigious
but already losing momentum, as does a bullet after
leaving the muzzle of a rifle. Consider his height.
Before birth, the original length has increased five
hundred times; after birth, it will multiply less than
four times in twenty odd years, and will thereafter
cease. His muscular endurance relative to his weight
is notoriously great at birth. His intelligence will
reach'its maximum" quotient" at seventeen, and cannot,
according to our te ts, thereafter be increased, but
only enriched in content through extended experience.
Included in the powers of the curious harp of the
infant is the power which, we hold, distinguishes man
from all his fellow animals, of self-awareness. The
beginnings of self-consciousness in the child are on a
level with animal intelligent purpose, and reveal themselves
as certain simple needs. The bottle, the
layette, and the safety-pin conveniently symbolize the
satisfaction of his need of food, of warmth, and .of
avoidance of discomfort. He has an inborn tendency

~L\y 10. SOUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL RECORD. I 9
to satisfy his needs and avoid pain, and since,
obviously, he does not think out a plan, we call these
tendencies hereditary instincts. To tender him an
unvaried adequate environment is to secure domestic
peace; to offer experimental variation is to educe the
clamour of a household tyrant, and reveal the baby
as a supreme egoist. At this period his memory is
stored with unconscious images, which mould the
character of this conservative infant.
The next stage is marked by the appearance of
desire. ·As the Vedas say, "Desire in the beginning
came upon her, which was the first eed of thought."2
But desire is too often frustrated by the nature of
things, and by watchful guardians, and so the next stage
of mental growth is reached. As a witty contributor
to the Athen(1;1wm wrote, "intellect appears only when
the will is frustrated, and is the measure of its frustration.
Yes, intellect is a kind of cunning which
thrives on frustration."3 You will call this a halftruth,
yet it is borne witness to by our language,
which derives from one root the words "cunning,"
"kenning," "knowing," and "kingship."
Thus, from needs, desires, intelligent planning, and
above all from memory, is born the elf-consciousnes
of the man child, the philosophical empiricist.
The baby is the typical individuali t. You may hear
an articulate infant mind speaking in Mr. Maarten
Maarten's "God's Fool." Elias Lo sell, of Koopstad,
had lost his sight and much of his mental power from
traumatic meningitis in childhood. He says to his
devoted nurse, "I should like to love everybody, only
that it seems like loving nobody. But I love you best,
]ohanna, except myself. I-I love myself very
much, ] ohanna.... I think I should like to love you
better, ]ohanna, than I love myself. But I love my elf
very much. And I think I would rather have myself
happy, than anybody el e' happine s." The author
adds, "Elias was about twenty when he thus spoke.
He was too foolish, not to distinguish better between
what is and what we suppose to be."
The parallel between Elias, infantile in mentality,
and the individual who promotes his own advantage
by making a corner in building materials, or foodstuffs
needed by others, needs no stressing.
A baby's happiness may be summarized as lying
in self-fulfilment.
THE SCHOOL Boy.
Between Acts I and 2, as in legitimate drama, year
pas -seven, according to the Education Departmentof
which four at lea t are inaccessible to con cious
memory. In them the delightful harmonies of :l
happy temperament are educed: or, on the contrary,
defects and disharmonies of intellect and character are
revealed. The audience notices at this period two
main activities. There i the mastery of bodily tricks
called co-ordinations of movement, the habits of elfpreservation
of working and playing at work ; and
there is the more difficult art of speaking, of using
nouns and verbs, and of attaching a proper ignificance
to the e device. fOT repr04ucin~ and pre ~rvin~ the
3
fruits of experience. In either case there is a tendency,
either to accurate imitation of conventional usage or to
characteristic individual modifications, delightful or
perverse.
During school life these activities intensify. He
may develop into a handy-man, an amateur electrician
and plumber, an athlete or happy Eau, such as ] ohn
Leech's Englishman, who says "What a fine day!
Let's go and shoot omething." Hi instinct of
curiosity turning outwards on to things, he dissects
and reassembles clock and bicycles, contrive bombs
and fireworks, and work at the bench of carpenter
and chemist. \Vith luck, this curio ity may la t
through life, as the habit of scientific research, which
is but the art of answering one's own que tions, instead
of bothering other people. He will collect textbook
and monographs and books of adventure.
Under different impulses, his curiosity may turn
inwards, to his own reactiuns, and he becomes expert
in speech or in that silent speech we name thought.
He may become a poet, and react to life with senti~
ment and sonnets, or a scholar of erudition and verbal
preciosity, or that often unhappy mi fit, a genius
amongst the Philistine. Happie t is he who combines
in him elf a due proportion of out ide intere ts
and elf-knowledge, tinctured by a sen e of humour.
The happiness of the school-boy lies in continued
self-development and in discovery of that ystem we
call reality. He learns from the fallible powers of
the hou e and the form room. He learn from the
repositories of tribal learning called books, in respect
of which D. H. Lawrence utters a timely warning;
"I count it a mi take of our mistaken democracy that
every man who can read print is allowed to believe
that he can read all that i printed."4 There i , finally,
the not unmixed happines of having his private angle'
rounded off by contact with the crowd of his fellows.
Protective mimicry will make him conform to type
and observe the totems and taboos of the tribe, and
the code of behaviour which will later make him a
fit member of his regiment, his club, or his profession.
Philosophically he is a pragmatist.
THE LOVER.
Again years pas before the curtain ri es on Act 3,
years spent in learning to earn a living and become
an embryo citizen. In ome acting ver ion of life,
the lover's part is cut out, a in the clas ical example
of Humboldt, indu triou writer of many volume
on " the COS1110S." There i the le s need to epitomize
Act 3 for you, for not only does the whole world love
a lover, pester him with peeping curiosity and penalize
him when married with an increase of every type of
tax (except the bachelor tax), but an unendipg succession
of novelists since the day of Henry Fielding
have et forth his discovery of the Ear~hly Paradise,
that universe of two over which the Heavens
are opened in a vi ion, and in our own day underline
his mazed wanderings, and imperfect adju tments in
the life of love. For a bracing douche, the entimental
may be ac!vi ec! to r~ad a chapter of Mr. Law~

190 SOUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL RECORp. M.-\Y 10.
rence entitled "The Vicious Circle." The author has
drunk a Gargantuan draught from some Yogi
spring, probably led through American piping,
and the stuff has gone to his head, but he
sums up this act well. "The journey of love
has been rather a lacel-ating if well-worth-it
journey. But to come at last to a nice place
under the trees with your 'amiable spouse,' who
has at last learned to hold her tongue and not to
bother about rights and wrongs, her own particularly,
and then to pitch a camp and cook your rabbit and
eat him; and to possess your own soul in silence, and
feel all the clamour lapse. That is the best I know."
We have lowered the curtain before the act was
played .out, and left the young lover "sighing like
furnace," as full of tremors as Tokio, with his lines
unspoken. His strange cauldron of internal chemiceils,
whose reactions and fermen~s are the physical
basis of his life-purpose, has had added to
it a final hormone, that secret of rejuvenescence,
if we may believe the Press. It is
vital to his complete mental O"rowth. but its
impulse is a dislocating shock to his ~rdered life. In
his rapid self-expansion he ceases to lean upon his
parents like a half-baked pot, and learns that every
pot must stand on its own bottom. He develops
at once self-reliance, a new humility. for" what is
the. I.ove of men .that women seek {t ?" as Stephen
PllIlhps asks, a heightened insight into the possibilities
of life and altruism the most whole-hearted he has
known. Under these influences the arts blossom.
Such, then, is the happiness of the lover. His
philosophy is idealistic. "That which he is compelled
by the nature of his mental equipment to think
o~" himself, his love, and his prospects, is I-eal to
hll11, however unconvincing to his audience.
THE
SOLDIER.
The soldier who dominates the fourth Act is not
ne~essarily an immortal musketeer, nor a highly
tramed flight commander. He stands for all men of
action. He is any master workman. He is Colonel
Gorgas fighting the mosquito in Panama. He is the
research worker, with his brilliant results or instructive
failures. He is the man who must not make
mistakes wit~ things nor muddle through his job, be
t.hat conductI.ng a campaign, performing an operatIon,
or handlmg explosive material. There is scant
need to as~ these sons of Martha, realists in philosophy
and practl~e, where th~ir happiness lies. They are
not loquacIOus, but their few words are winged-you
remember" The Silence of Col. Bramble,"5 and l;ow
that taciturn officer hushed difficult debate at mess
with his "Pass. th~ port "-but believe that thought
an~ spe.cch ar~ Justified only as a half-way halt before
actIOn, Immediate or delayed. They follow the advice
of Poloniu :
"Give thy thought no tongue
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act,"
and the warning of a modern philosopher" Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be siJent."G The
soldier's happiness lies in getting things done, gracefully
if he can, but at all costs done.
Let me tell you of one of our country's men of
action. A local farmer had to drive to Bathurst in :l
hurry. His nearest road crossed a stream at the
Albany boundary, and on the muddy hill his aged
English car stuck on the steep gradient. He sent a
boy for oxen, and, waiting, he reasoned that, the
bigger the driving wheel, the less the mechanical advantage
to the engine. So he stripped off the rear
covers and got out on bare rims, replaced the tyres
and did his job. Again bogged in a mud-hole and far
from help, he locked one end of a non-skid chain
to the rim of the rear wheel, laid the chain to firm
ground and pegged the far end down with his jack
lever. On the second attempt the engine dre\-\-" the
car out of the mud-hole.
THE JUSTICE.
To the man of strenuous activitie comes the later
dignity of the Justice's Bench. He is the muchtravelled
Ulysses, his Ithaca regained and duly
ordered, looking back over the uncharted seas of his
life. His is the search for the just word, the devising.
of tests fo~ the validity of imaginative thought, the
reserve of Judgment on those guesses at truth called
philosophic systems. He cannot let them alone, for,
a~ Ronald Knox wrote, "the mind, satiated with the
ceaseless pageant of the interminable, craves for some
outward expression of the Eternal,"7 yet his trend is
toward philosophic scepticism. His attitude towards
youth is that of Mrs. Carden in Rose MacCauley',;
"Told by an Idiot": "Imogen sighed a little. Her
mother was so practical. You asked for doctrine
and she ~ave you advice. Being married, and particularly
bemg a mother, often makes women like that.
They know that doctrine is no use, and cherish the
illusion that advice is."s Doctrine, he knows, is clear
and dogmatic; advice generally represents a compromise
between conflicting doctrines.
. The. Justice ~nds immense happiness in joining up in
hiS Il1md certam fragments of the jiO"-saw puzzle of
existence. and .dimly discerning the underlying patter:!.
Should he wnte a book, he produces such a classic
as John Hilton's "Rest and Pain," or the essays of
James Paget, William Osier, Gilbert Murray, and the
rest of the prophets. Nor has he lived in vain if
experience has yielded to him the fruits of insight
and balance, of mental detachment and tolerance.
THE PANTALOON AND
SENILE DEMENT.
Our greatest actors decline to play Acts 6 and 7
as defined by the melancholy Tacques. Recall the
dignity of death in \iVolfgang Goethe completing
" Faust" at 81 and dying in his chair; or in Sir
William Turner of Edinburgh, who published his
ethnological studies of the Scottish people, a few
months before his death, in 1916, in his 85th year.
To rust out in detail is the fate of the pantaloon and
the senile dement. These men show us the enn
of the trajectory of the bullet of lift}. At the soaring
height of their powers they may have refuted

MAY 10. SOUTH FRIC MEDICAL RECORD. 191
Einstein or scaled Mount Everest, now they are
slowly degrading until they reach mother earth.
Awl now that the curtain has fallen in silence on th~
human drama, we, sitting in the critics' stalls, have
selectcd six notable sources of human happine s. They
may be labelled self-realization, conformity to an
accepted ideal, altrui tic love, adequate action, the
use of the reflective rea on, and peaceful acceptance
of inevitable destiny. Attempting to subsume the~e
six aspects of happiness under a sing-le formula, we
define happiness as lying in harmonious reaction to
~timulus.
Take this definition to pieces, and you find three
factors concerned in the harmony we desire. Therc
is the stimulus from outside; there is the org-ani m
which reacts, the harp which is struck; and there i.
the reaction, the resultant melody.
The physiologist who declares that without impulses
from outside no harp would resound is no more
di honouring humanity than is the theologian who
avers that .. \\'e have no power of ourselves to help
our eh'es'" tie appeal to the effects of solitary
confinement in a dark cell. even on a mind well stored
by experience and study. Does not that refined torment
consist in the complete cessation of the wonted
stream of impressions on the mind through the eye
and ear? Ask of the people. \Vould Mr. Clive Bell
experience a 11 cesthetic emotion unless an unwonted
sight hit him in the eye? Do not we doctors drive
swift car in the streets. and disg-uise ourselves on
holidays as commercial travellers, becau c the sig-ht of
a doctor excites the de ire for a wayside con 'ultation )
Did not the presentation of the old-fashioned eartrumpet
make one long to drop peas into it? We
admit that the stimulus may not be consciously registered:
that is why example i better than precept,
why children imitate chorea or a stammer why
rumour spreads. and crowds exhibit panic fear. The
stimulus Illay strike but once: ... I did but see her
passing by, and yet I love her till I die'" Response
to stimulus is 110 haphazard affair. For the instrument
has been repeatedly struck and attuned,
and its response is conditioned by the past experiences,
associated in memory with the present
situation. For this reason, biographers trace the
early surroundings of their ·ubject. And here
1 'hould ·Iike to bear tardv witness to the
stimulus to my eventeen-year-olrl mind of my first
meeting with a working chemist. the late Mr. r. \IV.
Gatehouse, F.I.C.. Public Analyst of Bath in the
eighties, with his home-made galvanometer still and
stink cupboard, engaged in analyzing the stomach contents
of phea ant. dead from a diet 'of buttercup
root. Each of us could recall notable impact of
striking personalitie upon our own. and atte t the
re 'ulting modification of the responsi\'e harp.
Then there is the org-an ism which reacts. It is
formed by racial and familial heredity. Since Ivan
Pavlov's demonstrationS that the fi fth generation 0 f
trained mice reproduce conditioned reflexe to th~
dinner bell eighty time- more rapidly than the untrained
mouse, we need not cavil at the inheritance
of ability and other "hemispherical characteristics."
"Wc mock our elve of the dog-matic doctrine of the
theologically trained Wei smann. The harp may be
deformed by early experiences, malformed from hardship,
10\\'ered in pitch by the depressant effect of war
and pogroms; its trings may be broken by 10 sand
betrayal, but in general it i tuned by nurture and
experience: and the aim of education, experimental
business as it still is, is to draw forth its powers of
harmonious response.
Finally, there is this busine s of response in which
the analogy of the harp omewhat fails us. In it i
a growing and living- in trument we deal with, formed
of flesh, with defined chemical and phy ical make-up;
of instincts, emotions and habits. with imaginative
power to modulate the key of the melody, with a
personal timbre, and variable overtone. with inhibitory
powers of refusal to re pond except to certa:~
timuli, in accordance with an accepted scale of
values.
This reaction must be harmonious. that is, it must
be in accordance with the nature of the man when
he is at the top of his form. It is true, as \ illiam
\Vallace warn us, that" unfortunately such a unified
being is only an ideal. a standard man, with whom
to compare the man,"o yet the best men are engaged
in just that race for the ideal, do "pres on to the
goal for the prize" (1\'Ioffa.t's trans.).
One may admit freely that, judO'ed by uch an
ideal standard, most of u are not alway happy; that
i., why we organize committees, games, and wars, as
distractions. Yet, to have li ved fully once is to
have known happiness in that moment, to have
viewed this our exi tence sub specie ({!tenlifa!is, in a
region immeasurable in leagues and ceOI1 , by the
illumination of the light invi ible.
To be happy, you must be doing each job a it
comes. just a unimpeded children do; 'ou mu t do
what you want to do with your whole being-, heart,
soul. trength and mind, not do what you imagine
the sort of man you picture yourself to be ought to be
doing. You must lose you r elf in your part ju t as .
certainly as does the actor who g-ets acro the footlight.
or cOlwince the experienced movie producer.
The latter, we are tolel, cannot pa a imulated emotion;
he mu t have the real thing-, even if it need the
lash of his tongue to produce it. J~1 t so, you can no
more make your elf happy than you can make yourself
want or love. This doing what .you . want ounds
like a subtle variant of the doctrine of the superman.
But \\'e hold with Uncle George "Mills 1o that "one
touch of Jiet che make the whole world in," and
that no man \\·ho ha learned to think a a ocial unit
can deliberately aim at injury to other. Is there not
omething- inhuman in Bernard Pali Y'3 zeal for
beauty when it consigned hi family' hou ehold furniture
to the porcelain furnace? For the mo t part, it
i possible to keep one eye on your star. and one on
your neighbour's intere ts. without squinting intolerably.

192 OUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL RECORD. M.w 10.
To react adequately to every stimulu , to be a pract!­
cal stoic knowing oneself, in nothing extravagant, tIllS
it i to be happy. Thi is an old secret, for the
preacher wrote, "whatsoever thy hand find~th t~ do,
do it with all thy might." ot otherWIse dId. a
great letter-writer advise the men of Thessalomka
"that ye be ambitiou to live quietly, and to do your
own business and to work with your own hands,"
and to them' of Philippi, "\iVhatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are lovely ... think on th~se
things." ot only do we resound to contact wIth
men and book "of good report," but even from
things repellant, base, and unlovely by so~e. mysterious
harmonization comes matter for musIc 111 the
harp.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I thank you for your
patience. At this Congress, and always, we servants
of Apollo will labour at the keel of health, and we
wish you all the mirth of which your ribs are
capable.
REFERENCES.
1 H arold L. M enckel/, {( Prejudices," 2/ld Series,
lonathan Cape, 1921. {( The Diville Affiattts,"
p. 159·
2 Vedas, quoted b'y H. Fielding Hall, (( Love's.
Lege/ld." COl/stable.
s" The Nation" and (( Athena?um," Aug. 4th, 1923:
" Natural Histories," {( The O')lster."
4 D. H. Law1'ence, (( Fantasia of the Unconscio1ts,"
i'v[artin Secker, 1923.
5 (( The Silence of Colonel Bramble," Andre
M aurois, lohn Lane, 1919.
6 Ludwig Wittgellstein, {( Tractat1ts Logico-philosophic1ts,"
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trllbher and Co.,
1922.
7 Ronald Knox, « Memories of the Future,"
M ethuen, 1923.
8Ivan Pavlov at the International Ph'ysiological
Congress. Edinburgh, 192~. (Swnttnary
" B .M. lOllrnal," Aug. IIth, 1923.) .
in the
9 ~Villiam 'i-Vallace, « Essays in M oral Philosophy;
Person and Personality,'~ O_~ford Univ. Press,
1898.
10 C. E. M. load, « The Highbro'ws," lonathan
Cape, 1922.
Dr. A. P. "VI oolwright, of Germiston, rece~tly had
a remarkable motor accident, and was only saved by
his pre ence of mInd from erious injuries or death.
He was crossing the railway between Booysens and
Germiston when a train which he had not noticed
came up. He had no time to get pa t it or to back
away, but managed to turn the car in the same direction
as the train, which caught it in flank, dragged it
along a few yards and then flung it aside. Dr. Woolwright
remained in the car all the time. and only sustained
a few bruises.
}. (ilamt at tbt '-tbical Jjistafll of tbt (tape
Qt:a1anll! parti£ulllrlt! of tbt ~llIttrn 1lrabime.
By PROF. SIR GEORGE CORY, l\I.A., D.Litt.
(Opening Address at the 19th S.A. Medical
Congress.)
DISCIPLES OF .tCUL.-\PI S .\ND HIPPOCRATE , LADIES
Al\D GENTLE:\1E. ,
It is now nearly 30 years since the "Medical Congress
last honoured Grahamstown by holding its
session in this place. And now that you have given
us the opportunity of welcoming you here again. we
hope you will be favourably impressed with the progress
and development in matters medical which you
will observe. First and foremost there is our new
and up-to-date hospital in place of the old Albany
General Hospital, which many of us, unregretfully,
saw consumed by flames; and to meet the necessities
of these days o'f mental stress and strain the Fort
England Mental Hospital has become nearly twice
the size it was at the time of your last visit. Then,
again, the Chronic Sick Hospital, now Prince Alfred's
Infirmary. i gradually 10 ing its appearance of a
Cape Corps barracks and taking on the character
of the Institution which its name implies. And
now, as further signs of progress, we are able to
entertain you within the walls of this seat of learning
where medical study may, at lea t. be begun, and
where perhaps at some' distant date we may be
privileged, as in the cases of Cape Town and Johannesburg,
to send forth fully Qualified medical men.
But this is of the present and the future. It is fitting
now to cast a backward glance, and trace roughly,
from its commencement, the rise of medical practice
and organization in South Africa generally, and the
Eastern Province in particular.
Up to the time when the Cape came finally under
British rule in 1806 the medical men of the country
were chieflv the surgeons of the Dutch East India
Company.. There was now and then, however, some
wandering botanist who, in his peregrinations after
strange vegetation, prescribed. right and left, his
herbals or Halle medicines. But by far the greater
numbe"r of so-called physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries
were individuals who were wholly incompetent
and innocent of the knowledge they should
possess, and yet who, so we are told, prescribed
laudanum, arsenic and mercuric chloride in a manner
which must have been a joy to the undertaker.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs oon impressed
itself upon the notice of the then GovernoI)Genera .
H. G. Grey. On April 24th, 1807, he issued a proclamation
\vhich may be regarded as the .foundation
and first attempt at' the proper organization of the
medical profession, A~c9rgjn~ to this, bad drugs