iness is
popular ignorance and credulity. And it needs to be pretty broad to
support a traffic of such enormous proportions.

During this generation certain branches of the life-saving and
life-prolonging art have made great advances out of empiricism onto the
solid ground of scientific knowledge. Of course I refer to surgery, and
to the discovery of the causes and improvement in the treatment of
contagious and epidemic diseases. The general practice has shared in this
scientific advance, but it is limited and always will be limited within
experimental bounds, by the infinite variations in individual
constitutions, and the almost incalculable element of the interference of
mental with physical conditions. When we get an exact science of man, we
may expect an exact science of medicine. How far we are from this, we see
when we attempt to make criminal anthropology the basis of criminal
legislation. Man is so complex that if we were to eliminate one of his
apparently worse qualities, we might develop others still worse, or throw
the whole machine into inefficiency. By taking away what the
phrenologists call combativeness, we could doubtless stop prize-fight,
but we might have a springless society. The only safe way is that taught
by horticulture, to feed a fruit-tree generously, so that it has vigor
enough to throw off its degenerate tendencies and its enemies, or, as the
doctors say in medical practice, bring up the general system. That is to
say, there is more hope for humanity in stimulating the good, than in
directly suppressing the evil. It is on something like this line that the
greatest advance has been made in medical practice; I mean in the
direction of prevention. This involves, of course, the exclusion of the
evil, that is, of suppressing the causes that produce disease, as well as
in cultivating the resistant power of the human system. In sanitation,
diet, and exercise are the great fields of medical enterprise and
advance. I need not say that the physician who, in the case of those
under his charge, or who may possibly require his aid, contents himself
with waiting for developed disease, is like the soldier in a besieged
city who opens the gates and then attempts to repel the invader who has
effected a lodgment. I hope the time will come when the chief practice of
the physician will be, first, in oversight of the sanitary condition of
his neighborhood, and, next, in preventive attendance on people who think
th