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

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 217
Delivered, Fifty-seventh Annual Session of the Illinois State Medical
Society, May 21-23, 1907.
Printed, Illinois Medical Journal, August, 1907.
THE
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF TUBERCULOSIS
work in the tuberculosis field naturally divides
itself into three categories more or less distinct:
first the development of the scientific facts under
the guidance of pathologists, coupled with clinical effort
appropriating and adapting for therapeutic purposes all
of the accumulating data.
When one considers what has been accomplished since
1880 in this direction, it seems as though we were surelyapproaching
a fundamental conception of the strife between
the parasite and the organism. For practical purposes we
certainly have an abundance of valuable data. It must be
borne in mind, however, that the whole subject of the
reaction of the human organism to the hostile
parasite is
under careful investigation and review, and that our conception
of tuberculosis will have to follow the developments
of knowledge in respect to these deep physiologic problems,
perhaps to the point of entirely altering what is now reasonably
fixed scientific dogma. Our great advances in therapeutics
have not been entirely due to this increase of accuracy
in our scientific concept.
In certain respects a knowledge of the true nature of
tuberculosis has been an aid in the combat against it as a
general proposition, but the present stage of therapeutic
efficiency is the result of scientific effort, clinical rather than
pathologic.
Therapeutics is, as it has always been, essentially empiric,
and whether we shall ever see the time when it is not
so is conjecture. Beyond all question the plan of treatment
now approved is the result of painstaking and determined
experiment, based upon close observ^ation and wide