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

io8 HENRY BAIRD FAVILL
Delivered to Alumni of Rush Medical College, June, 1897.
Printed, Intercollegiate Medical Journal, July, 1897.
IN
TOXIC CORRELATION
regard to this somewhat startHng title I wish to
explain that my idea is to suggest the fact, that there
exist in our clinical experience many conditions and
combinations of conditions, whose origin and sequence
bear to each other very close relation, and that not in haphazard
ways but in ways most methodical.
We are now in the era of observation of toxic phenomena,
and see with a distinctness heretofore impossible
much of the truth which unlocks obscure situations.
It is noteworthy that the legitimate fruit of the most
advanced research is a well-demonstrated humoral pathology,
the limits of which one dare not at this time suggest.
After all the satisfactory light shed by cellular pathology,
the query was bound to come, Why has a cell a
pathology? The answer has come provisionally and is
furnished by chemists and biologists as follows: The perverted
cell has three main sources of its degeneracy, (a)
nutritive supply corresponding to environment, (b) its
innervation, constituting its functional experience, and
(c) its tropic control; all evolved under the potential of
its
heredity.
Therefore when we regard morbid states as the aggregate
reaction of the molecular body subject to those influences,
Its
need we be surprised that the simple pathologic
conditions take multiple forms, or that various unlike
manifestations may trace a common origin?
I wish to confine my comments to conditions which are
explained by toxic materials in the circulatory blood, and
to define toxic in such terms as to imply material which
is noxious, either in kind or in relative amount.
It is not possible, even if time permitted, to define the