ely relative; there is no single
tissue-change, no group even of changes or of symptoms, of which we can
say, "This is essentially morbid, this is everywhere and at all times
disease."

Our attainment of any clear view of the essential nature of disease was
for a long time hindered, and is even still to some degree clogged, by
the standpoint from which we necessarily approached and still approach
it, not for the study of the disease itself, but for the relief of its
urgent symptoms. Disease presents itself as an enemy to attack, in the
concrete form of a patient to be cured; and our best efforts were for
centuries almost wasted in blind, and often irrational, attempts to
remove symptoms in the shortest possible time, with the most powerful
remedies at our disposal, often without any adequate knowledge whatever
of the nature of the underlying condition whose symptoms we were
combating, or any suspicion that these might be nature's means of
relief, or that "haply we should be found to fight against God." There
was sadly too much truth in Voltaire's bitter sneer, "Doctors pour drugs
of which they know little, into bodies of which they know less"; and I
fear the sting has not entirely gone out of it even in this day of
grace.

And yet, relative and non-essential as all our definitions now recognize
disease to be, it is far enough (God knows) from being a mere negative
abstraction, a colorless "error by defect." It has a ghastly
individuality and deadly concreteness,--nay, even a vindictive
aggressiveness, which have both fascinated and terrorized the
imagination of the race in all ages. From the days of "the angel of the
pestilence" to the coming of the famine and the fever as unbidden guests
into the tent of Minnehaha; from "the pestilence that walketh in
darkness" to the plague that still "stalks abroad" in even the prosaic
columns of our daily press, there has been an irresistible impression,
not merely of the positiveness, but even of the personality of disease.
And no clear appreciation can possibly be had of our modern and rational
conceptions of disease without at least a statement of the earlier
conceptions growing out of this personifying tendency. Absurd as it may
seem now, it was the legitimate ancestor of modern pathogeny, and still
holds well-nigh undisputed sway over the popular mind, and much more
than could be desired over that of the profession.

The earliest conception of disease of which we have any re