But Captain John Smith, the amazing John Smith of Virginia, speaks with derision of those who would rather ‘lose ten sheepe than be at the charge of a halfe penny worth of tarre.' In many English dialects 'sheep' is regularly pronounced 'ship,' and the Ship Street of our country towns represents an earlier Sheep Street, leading generally to the sheep-market. Tar is a very ancient medicine for some diseases of sheep. When the preliminary difficulties of a problem are cleared away, we say, 'Now all is plain sailing.' But the sailor speaks of 'plane-sailing,' and, though 'plain' and 'plane' are really the same word, the allusion is not to simplicity, but to navigation by a plane chart- that is, one drawn on the theoretical assumption that the earth's surface is plane and not spherical. During the World War, the type of man who in France had the name jusquauboutiste was sometimes in England called a 'bitter-ender,' as being determined to see things through 'to the bitter end.'. If we again consult Captain John Smith, we find that the 'bitter' is the 'turn of a cable about the bitts,' and that to pay out cable or rope 'to the bitter end' is to let it run out till none remains inboard. Mistaken association with the adjective 'bitter' has given a stern sort of vigor to the metaphorical application of the phrase.

Most people know that 'forlorn hope' was originally a military name for a desperate storming party (the enfants perdus of French), and that it is borrowed from Old Dutch verloren hoop, 'lost heap'; also that 'to curry favor' is a meaningless corruption of a much earlier 'to curry Favel,' the latter word being the Old French Fauvel, the name of a fallow horse in a mediæval allegory, der fahle Hengst of German legend. But I doubt whether there are many who realize the fantastic change of form and meaning that has given us the

expression 'to take heart of grace.' This elaboration of the simpler 'to take heart' is one of those grotesque and clumsy word-plays in which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries delighted. A 'hart of grease' was a hart in prime condition, with the proper depth of fat upon his ribs. 'Heart' and 'hart' were originally spelled alike, a fact which perhaps helped to perpetuate this singularly pointless complex.

The Revised Version of the English Bible, published in 1884, shows that some of the most picturesque expressions in the language rest upon mistranslations. There can hardly be a phrase more full of awful boding than 'the valley of the shadow of death,' one of the many jewels which the Authorized Version inherited from Coverdale. It is true that the Revised Version preserves this reading, but the marginal note gives the alternative, and probably more correct, 'valley of deep darkness.' The early vernacular translations were based on the Vulgate and the Septuagint, both of which often misinterpret. the Hebrew pointing. Thus ferrum pertransiit animam ejus was poetically rendered in the Prayer Book version of the Psalms 'the iron entered into his soul.' This is also the reading of the Great Bible (1539), while the Authorized Version and the Revised Version have the more prosaic 'he was laid in (chains of) iron,' which represents the Hebrew original, instead of the erroneous Vulgate. 'Scapegoat' was coined by Tyndale as a translation of the caper emissarius of the Vulgate. The Revised Version replaces this by the proper name 'Azazel,' with the alternative rendering 'dismissal.' When one thinks of the absolute impossibility of expressing in any other way the idea contained in the picturesque 'scapegoat,' one is thankful that early textual interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures was sometimes uncertain.

Ar the foot of the Acropolis in Athens is a small cave into which seeps a tiny spring. The traveler who visits it notices first the water, for water is always worth notice in Athens, then a little altar, next a slender candle or two, their meagre flames struggling with the close atmosphere. His eyes become accustomed to the dimness, and he sees, fastened here, there, and everywhere upon the walls, little metal plates impressed with the outlines of an arm, a leg, a human torso, or an infant in swaddling clothes - plates of tin, aluminum, nickel, or silver, according to the wealth of the ones who hung them.

This cave was once the holy of holies in the sanctuary of Asclepius, god of healing. Ruined memorials of his shrine still stand about the threshold; belief in the miraculous healing powers of his cave and spring still thrives, without a trace of ruin, in the hearts of the people near by. To obtain relief from their illnesses, or those of kindred and friends, they bring to the cave likenesses or symbols of the parts affected, go through the correct ritual, and wait for the cure.

a silver goblet mashed in a scuffle between rival butlers. It is interesting to observe, however, that here, as well as in many places elsewhere, a strong bond between the material and the spiritual is felt to exist in the mystery of healing, the water and the locality of the cave providing the material elements, the faith of the natives the spiritual.

Early in his search for a means of coping with discomfort, man imagined a close relation between religion and disease. Literature of centuries past and observation of peoples living today in a state comparable to the childhood of the race both indicate that man of times gone by considered disease a visitation of beings more powerful than himself. But just as the child eventually comes to the point where he realizes that the broom he straddles is a horse only by virtue of his own flight of fancy and that the stick he flourishes is a sword for the same reason, so man had to reach a stage where his mind. separated what is substantial from what is his own attribute and interpretation of that substantial thing.

Out of the intermingling of the imaginary with the physical, man developed the concept of a natural world as opposed to the fanciful. Rivers with treacherous currents, for instance, came to be dissociated from the idea of a baneful demon presiding over them, and to have their dangers explained on more material bases. Whispering

nymphs were discarded as reasons for the sighing of the forests, and rustling of leaves and topmost boughs of trees under the blast of the wind were substituted for them. And with the separation of fact from fancy is connected the development of modern medicine. The early beginnings, however, are not to be despised; for out of medicine's original connection with religion grew a knowledge of the therapeutics of fasting and catharsis, even though ages passed before these were looked upon as anything other than spiritual devices. Out of that connection, also, arose that vast and complicated structure of magic lore, which, if one considers its symbolic drawings and tattooings, its weird concoctions of potions and philtres, its amulets, charms, and talismans, might be regarded as the mother of the sciences and the arts.

But modern sympathetic study of magic is revealing that its practitioners relied not so much as is imagined upon the supernatural. Behind the prescriptions calling for the use of 'fillet of a fenny snake.. eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, lizard's leg,' root of hemlock, and gall of goat, has been found a substantial natural justification, even though Macbeth's witches may not have known its existence. Experimentation with snake poison, for instance, especially that of rattlers, has shown that it is useful in combating epilepsy. From the skin of a tropical toad the pharmacologist has extracted bufagin, a powerful heartstimulant similar to digitalin; and centuries ago Chinese magic-doctors employed toad-skin in cardiac difficulties. Now the student of gland therapy finds the administering of bile-gall of sheep or calf, to-day — a highly effective procedure in dealing with faulty bowel-elimination that has become chronic.

II

The development of magic marks a step forward in the development of medicine. How much of the advance was conscious and how much unconscious, contributed by human love of the mystifying, no one can say. As yet, however, the evolution is far from complete. Microscopic organisms, the 'germs' of common talk, have been substituted in the popular mind for the worms and snakes of primitive medicine. The theory that many pathological states are due to abnormal internal secretions has been substituted for the old doctrine of the 'humors.' And one might, with little stretch of the imagination, find for the psychic aspects of the early relation between religion and disease a modern counterpart in the Freudian use of the unconscious use which has permitted the adoption of the principle of determinism in the mental sphere and has put investigation in that sphere more nearly on a plane with investigation in the physical sciences.

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Medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, and psychology - these are the ends, at least the visible, modern ends of the thought started when the first Job was visited with boils or trodden upon by a mastodon. The nature of the catastrophe is immaterial. Medicine is the patriarch of the group, but a patriarch who has only recently come to mobilize the entire forces of his family in the age-old feud with disease.

Although in ancient Egypt, in the land of Chemi, where priests experimented with simple substances for the making of curative concoctions, there was a close union between chemistry and medicine, these two sciences became separated for many centuries. The chemist, as illustrated in the pioneer work of Agricola on metallurgy, turned his knowledge largely to the

production of wealth in the industries. This defection has resulted in much suffering which closer coöperation between physician and chemist might have spared humanity. For instance, the thirteenth century saw the discovery of ether. Not until 1846 did physicians recognize its value as an anæsthetic; for over five hundred years was the race denied the benefits of this queller of pain. Magnesium sulphate was known to chemists in 1694; two hundred years elapsed before the knowledge came that it would relieve lockjaw, burns, and strychnine poisoning. Twenty-three years passed between the chemist's discovery of amyl nitrite and the physician's discovery that it relieves the tortures of angina pectoris.

To-day the pharmacologist presiding over a well-supplied laboratory in an institution of research represents perhaps the best blend of physician and chemist. The maximum of success in the alleviation of suffering is, however, to be attained only when the pharmacologist serves as the medium between chemist and physician: when all three work in recognized interrelationship.

One modern department of medicine stands out prominently for the coöperation it has produced between chemist and physician. That is the department of gland therapy or endocrinology. Not only has development in this field emphasized the early relation between the chemist and the leech, alchemist the former must have been in those days, but it has also directed thought to the primitive connection of these two with the priest. When, by means of the administering of thyroid extract, a cretin-a person whose development has been arrested so far as to make him an imbecile is transformed into a person approaching normal form and intellect, popular imagination, at least, is justified in seeing a

similarity between this miracle and the ancient one of casting out devils.

But the miracles of to-day are more complex than those of days gone by. Every human body is now conceived to be a chemical laboratory, in which the most complicated transformations are continually taking place. Every man, even in the midst of health, is a walking drug-store, the pharmacologists maintain; and the impairment or inadequacy of his drug-supply may result in diseases such as gout, diabetes, goitre, giantism, and insanity. Even invading disease-germs accomplish their fell work in many cases through chemical agencies, their toxins being potent drugs that act upon the heart, respiratory nerve-centres, or some other vital apparatus. Sometimes also, failing of specific action, they gradually poison the whole system.

The approach to endocrine therapy has been devious and dark. Long periods were devoted by the anatomist to outlining the glands and noting their positions. Painstaking efforts were made to determine the spheres in which the various glands were active. And then the anatomist and the pharmacologist secured secretions, the powers of which were anything but precisely defined. In this work of isolation and definition, the success of Professor Abel of Johns Hopkins, whose investigations led to the isolation of adrenalin, the pure principle of the adrenal glands, is a signal one. Perhaps another isolation is not far ahead, for the same scientist has recently obtained a tartrate extracted from the pituitary gland. When experiments show that this extract must be diluted 18,750,000,000 times for actual use thereof would turn into pituitary extract all the water in a one-foot pipe running from New York to San Francisco - one is amazed at the potency of these internal drugs. Wonderful as

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the results here seem, one is told that they are but the beginning, and that there is much need of the chemist's aid for future success.

To the development of the germ theory, fundamentally a biological one, medicine is heavily indebted. Without Pasteur, Koch, Behring, Flexner, and many others, medicine could not have acquired many of its modern approaches to exactness. Bath bacteriologist and pathologist, however, have now reached a point where they must turn to chemistry for the solution of their most important problems. The antitoxins which are injected into human bodies are at best but crude mixtures, laden with undesirable and to some extent harmful ingredients. These most powerful weapons for combating invading germs are chemical substances of specific curative power, but of unknown composition.

The theory behind the use of antitoxins involves introducing into the human system a weakened or dead virus that is calculated to hasten development of immunity and sometimes, as in the case of meningitis, to neutralize the toxin caused by the germ of the disease. To secure an antitoxin for meningitis, for instance, dead bacteria of that disease are injected into a horse previously watched and studied to determine its healthfulness. At intervals of eight days, for a period of four months to a year, doses are repeated, until the horse can withstand large injections, not of dead but of living bacteria. From the blood of this horse is then obtained the serum which is sent out to physicians for use.

The antitoxins, it may readily be seen, are significant examples of human ingenuity in employing animals as living chemical factories; but there is no way of checking up on the output of these factories. Chemical methods applied to the isolation of the pure prin

ciples of antitoxins would enable medicine to make a great advance. Such an application might give the practitioner the power to combat an infection by swift, exact, and sufficiently potent doses, whereas now he acts often with hesitation and misgivings.

In addition to the assistance needed by medicine to perfect recognized remedies, there are projected medicaments, ghosts of drugs, as it were, which the chemist is asked to help to turn into real substance. For example, it is known to-day that a modification of quinine gives promise as a specific for pneumonia. It destroys the pneumococcus germ in glass vessels; it is used successfully in external pneumococcus infections, as of the eye; but it is still too poisonous to be used in sufficient strength in the blood to combat the multitudes of invading germs in pneumonia itself. As inspiration for investigation into this quinine product stands the work done on cocaine. Although a valuable local anæsthetic, cocaine was often found to be poisonous. Chemical study revealed that it was a complex compound, some parts of which produced a beneficial anæsthetic, whereas others were definitely poisonous. Part of the poisonous material is closely related to the deadly principle of the hemlock, famous as the poison which Socrates was made to drink, and still another part is akin to nicotine.

With this knowledge of cocaine established, the chemist was in a position to improve on nature and invent a number of local anesthetics with the virtues of cocaine and without its poisons. Some of these superior anæsthetics are procaine (introduced under the name of novocaine), beta-eucaine, apothesine, and, more recent, benzyl alcohol. Now even major operations for appendicitis, hernia, and uter troubles are being performed

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