Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 93
in a given vital process must be determined by a perspective
view, in which the intrinsic flaw may be frequently subordinate
to the burden of compensation devolving upon
succeeding factors in the nutritive sequence. All of this
proceeds automatically under normal conditions, present
and historical.
Immediate normal conditions are hard to define, but are
closely dependent upon the maintenance of the relation of
supply and demand. If this ratio be normal, health will
result,
providing the further law of selection be allowed to
operate. It is in the historical aspect that the most inflexible
limitations occur.
Consider that the smallest physiological
trait, the most obscure nutritive vice, may be as
transmissible as facial features or mental quality; that
these may appear in offspring intensified actually by breeding
or relatively by aggravation of conditions of life.
Reflect
that the tendency of civilization is to determine both
conditions, and one is forced to acknowledge that he owes
much to his ancestors.
Digestion of food is of course fundamental to nutrition.
Yet, as we regard the term as applying to the primary acts
whereby food-stuffs are rendered soluble, it is a very limited
part of the process. Food which has been properly and
completely digested as a primary act is
utterly unfit to be
taken into the blood and circulated. It requires further
transformation, taking place variously back to more nearly
its original form to avoid the curious circumstance that in
its fully digested state it is actually a poison. Given, however,
its fitting digestion and transformations, which may
be termed secondary digestion, it has but entered upon its
mission as pabulum.
It is in part stored, in part passed on for immediate
appropriation — by what? By every individual cell of the
organism; and here is the great unexplored territory.
What happens within the limits of the microscopic cells,
each one a living thing capable of all the requirements of