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

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 145
All of this well-worked material demands another step.
The finer our classification the greater the need, because the
more immediate the application of a reason for cell perversion.
Our advance can no longer be anatomic — we
cannot get our solution from the study of structure, however
important and enlightening. We have no recourse but the
study of Process, and out of that we must derive the origin
of disease. The limitations of our knowledge will cause
us to fall far short of final solution, but the status of the
work is established in this newer territory, and this path
it must traverse.
Consider, for example, the general aspect of infection.
Surgically, it has long since come to pass that disease
pictures are regarded as elaborations of septic possibilities,
occurring under more or less known conditions. The site
of infection, the structural peculiarities, even the organ
involved, are subordinate to the type of the infection, as
manifested in its own development.
Morphologically identical
agents, under conditions indistinguishable, produce
the widest divergence of results. The physiology of the
micro-organism is the standard of its power, and the results
of its implantation are regarded as the strife of biologic
antagonists affecting the whole economy, rather than as
organic disease or default to which the infective agency
is
incidental.
In medicine this simplicity of view is not so established.
We talk of tonsillitis, of diphtheria, of croup and otitis
media, of cystitis and metritis, of pneumonia and meningitis,
maintaining all the time, to a large extent, the anatomic
relation instead of the infective.
Refiect, for example, upon
the fact that much of the tonsillitis, otitis, pulmonitis,
phlebitis, meningitis is due to pneumococcus infection.
Reflect further that this same group of nvrds, which are
too often regarded as the designations of disease,
are used
to cover a series of morbid conditions caused by the
streptococcus ; that the clinical designation of diphtheria has