Two uncommon esophageal cases / Anthony Bassler.

  • Bassler, Anthony, 1874-
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Two uncommon esophageal cases / Anthony Bassler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    livelihood, not for the cure of the patient but for pre- serving him in health and preventing him from falling sick. There will always be with us what may be termed physiologic medicine, the caring for women in normal childbirth, for the very young and the very old; always traumatic medicine or surgery; always a certain not inconsiderable amount of family medicine—for Johnnie will indulge in green apples so long as there are John- nies and apple-trees, and will suffer in consequence. Nay, more, I do not in the least imagine that we shall gain ascendancy over pathogenic bacteria as a body. I feel convinced that if we drive out such diseases as tuberculosis, typhoid and scarlet fever, we shall weaken the general bodily immunity. I think that we are realiz- ing more and more that a man does not so much escape the ordinary infectious diseases because he has a strong inherited immunity, as because, by good fortune, he has time and again been exposed to mild subinfectious doses of the virus, and in neutralizing these has gained such immunity that later he is able to resist doses which would otherwise set irp acute disease; and doing this that he raises not merely the specific but also the general resisting power of the organism. If, therefore, we eradicate certain specific germs which to-day are widely spread, we are in danger of lowering the general resistance to disease; our bodies will not be so well educated to resist, and we shall be apt to succumb to microbes and diseases which in our present state are incapable of attacking us. It follows that I imagine no Utopia from which infec- tion will be banished; only a state of generally improved conditions of existence in which the exanthemas and the severer infections will be much reduced in their inci- dence, and the active curative work of the physician will be definitely reduced, the preventive work as defi- nitely increased. Now, although the bacteriologist, detecting tubercle bacilli in the milk of a cow, by bring- ing about the compulsory slaughter of the beast pre- vents, it may be, a series of infants from succumbing to tabes mesenteriea, that bacteriologist—virtuous as has been his action—cannot bill all the families of a par- ticular milk-route for what- he has saved them; cannot say to the parents, “The estimated value of your child’s life to you and to the community has been officially estimated at so much, the chance that it would become infected from this particular cow was such and such,