The name of this
pestilence is Medical Science. Yes, it is most true, shudder
--shudder--as you will! Man's best friend turns to an asp in his
bosom to sting him to the basest of deaths. The devastating growth of
medical, and especially surgical, science--that, if you like, for us
all, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of what
surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions"
whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient
State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in
the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving
deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children.
The net result is in each case the same--the altered ratio of the total
amount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive
disease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our
worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent,
must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy. And this prospect
becomes more certain, when you reflect that the physician as we know
him is not, like other men and things, a being of gradual growth, of
slow evolution: from Adam to the middle of the last century the world
saw nothing even in the least resembling him.
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