Page 184 - My FlipBook

continually on the alert in your practice for all of these little
things, yet great things in the aggregate, that go to make for
success or for failure.
Now there is something lying over beyond these local
causes of decay that is important. Indeed, these local causes,
so-called, are only conditions giving opportunity for the real
cause to act. There are many things yet of which we only
have shadows of information. There is a cause lying be-
yond and controlling the a'ction of micro-organisms, that it is
important that we study. Those conditions that bring about
immunity, and those conditions that bring about suscepti-
bility. A predisposition to a disease is a condition of the body
juices and cells which renders the person liable to that particu-
lar disease. But when we come to speak of what that con-
dition of the body juices and the cells consists, we may know
nothing; we only know that the circumstances and the con-
ditions surrounding the beginning of disease must be ex-
iplained in some such way.
Every one of these conditions depends upon some mate-
rial form or combination of matter. We do not know this
of all, but we do know it of some of them, and it was these
that I have been trying to explain in the alexins, antitoxins,
etc., and the conditions in which these are produced and in
which they are not produced. An antitoxin will prevent the
person taking a certain disease. For instance, the antitoxin
of diphtheria, if properly applied in time during a diphtheria
epidemic, will prevent children from taking diphtheria; it acts
to control. Here you see we are proving the material form
of these things that control disease and health. So many of
these have now been proven to be material in their nature as
to give the strongest possible evidence that all of them are
material. We have been going through this process of vac-
cination to produce a material condition in our own bodies
that will prevent us from taking smallpox : a something, an
antitoxin that is produced in the blood, in the juices, in the
tissues of our own body.
Disease is hereditary. Tuberculosis has been reputed to
be intensely hereditary. That condition depends upon some
material element of the body; just what that is we may not
to-day know. The person is not born with the disease ; it
is not transmissible from parent to child, but the child is

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