"Dare To Be Healthy," of which this is but an abstract, deals
exhaustively with this topic. There the reader will find the most
interesting details in regard to the connection between these widely
divergent forms of disease. Their nature as blood-diseases carries with
it the fact that they are preeminently persistent through many
generations, so that today there is but a minority of human beings in
whom all tendency towards them is missing. So predisposition advances
with the continuity of environment, the one point at which, at least in
the case of the so-called white plague, or tuberculosis, an effort
against it has been made.

_The development towards the eradication of these evils has been
neutralised by the overwhelming importance science has given to the
theory of the bacillus as the incentive element of disease, while it is
only a product of the same.

The serum and anti-toxin therapy, which in its fight against the
bacillus, lost sight of the first task of medicine, that of fighting the
disease, was the logical consequence thereof._

The blood liquid which consists of the plasma and red and white blood
corpuscles, and is the carrier of the lymph to such parts of the body as
are not fed directly by the lymphatic vessels, such as the nerves, must
have a well defined chemical composition in order to fulfil its task.
What we call deficiency of blood is, with the exception of traumatically
inflicted losses, normal in quantity, to a great extent, but deficient
in quality. This consists in the chemical composition and the proportion
of nutritive salts in the serum, or in the relation and quality of the
oxygen carriers, that is, the red and white corpuscles, whose task it is
to remove foreign and disturbing elements from the blood.

It is obvious that deficiency in these elements may be of infinite
variety and of the most far reaching consequence for the various
tissues of the body, which receive their nourishment therefrom.

According to the nature of the effects which this variety in blood
deficiency (dysaemia) produces, we distinguish certain groups of
degenerations in the body, for which names were established at a time
when the unity of these forms of disease had not yet been recognized.
Thus, where dysaemia produces only general debility, we call it anaemia,
which may gradually become destructive and develop into "pernicious"
anaemia. When it affects girls with all kinds of disturbances in
menstruation, perve