Pleurisy : including empyema and bronchiectatic conditions / by Alex. James.

Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pleurisy : including empyema and bronchiectatic conditions / by Alex. James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    generation to the ever-growing sum of medical knowledge naturally tends to loom unduly in prominence and in magnitude. Yet, keeping this source of error in per- spective well before us, when we reflect that we in our times can chronicle the works of a Pasteur and a Lister, we can feel that in this respect our generation has reason indeed for genuine self-congratulation. But there is some- thing further, of which we must never be forgetful. This is, that just as the sum of the knowledge of a past genera- tion is overshadowed by that of the present, so shall the knowledge of the present be overshadowed by that of a future. I say this in no carping spirit, but in all humility; because I feel that—possibly in verification of Auguste Comte's trenchant saying, that great men are resembled by their disciples in nothing but their errors—our generation has had, as regards micro-organisms, to witness the attribution to them as a whole, and to certain of them in particular, of powers and potentialities as regards disease which, pet- se, I hold they do not possess. I have always been one of those who maintain that whilst the detection of a germ in a disease process is important enough, the interpretation of the conditions which have permitted it to invade a tissue, and to carry out there its morbid effects, is immensely more so. The story of this phase of disease causation has yet to be read; at present, though written indelibly by Nature's hands, it is undecipherable by us. That it will be read by those who follow is certain, and I feel equally assured that its reading and interpretation will proportionately benefit mankind. By bringing home to him more emphati- cally, as I feel sure it will, the recognition that in reality the germ is of God, and that it is only its virulence, or the susceptibility to it, which is of man, it will correspondingly bring home to him the realisation that this virulence or