Human Idiosyncrasies

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 104, 26 January 1935, Page 20

Human Idiosyncrasies

MEDICAL “science” has for a long time been more concerned about the study of disease than about the relieving of sick individuals. This latter task has, for the most part, been left to the daylabourers of medicine. The discovery of the important part played

by specific germs in the causation of a number of common disorders diverted interest from the reactions of the individual to external influences. “Diseases” once more came to be looked upon—much as primitive folk looked at them—as so many demoniac entities, to be excluded or.exorcised. The financial success of the old-time family doctor depended very largely or his capacity for convincing his patients that he understood their several constitutions. Is this belief in the variability of “constitution” a mere survival of mediaeval superstition, or is it founded oh demonstrable realities? We know that our minds and'our emotions differ enormously both in quantity and in kind. We know, al?o, that there are small but obvious physical differences between the thousand million of us, or whatever the number is, sufficient, to enable each individual, to be distinguished from all the others. Prima facie, it would seem likely that parallel microscopic and chemical dif ferences exist among the physical infinitesimals of which our bodies are made up. Bio-chemical research has proved the correctness of this pre-supposition: and it seems clear that our chemical differences are as deliuite as are our differences of physiognomy and of emotion.

"When St. Paul told the Corinthians that “all flesh is not the same flesh”— the flesh of men, the flesh of beasts, the flesh of fishes, and the flesh of birds, being all different—he anticipated some of the latest researches into the

nature of proteins. We have become so used to look upon the important factors of disease as external to ourselves that the contribution of the individual is apt to be underestimated. . Much of the criticism levelled at orthodox medicine is thus explicable. Generalisations about man’s reactions are as fallible in the world of physiology as in the worlds of morals and of aesthetics. A writer in the “Edinburgh Review,” over a century ago, referred to the fact that “among men of the same race and the same habits, one is poisoned by eggs, and the other by honey, almonds or cheese; another finds an antidote to dyspepsy in plum-pudding or mince-pie, and at the same time suffers from bread as from a poison.” It was not a bad definition which Berkeley gave of the human constitution, when he described it as "something in the idiosyncrasy of the patient that puzzles the physician.”

In our complacency, we are inclined to dwell on the wonderful capacity that man has displayed in adapting himself and his bodily and mental organisation to the circumstances which environ him. Have we fully realised the pace at which developments have been taking place in the environmental circumstances themselves? Human ingenuity has, •jn cruder matters —such as housing, heating, clothing and cooking—introduced “aids to living,” the importance of which is obvious. But, subtle and sinister rivals for world supremacy —the unicellular organisms—have also been changing to meet the new conditions. The race will be won by the species which is most swift in deliberate or spontaneous adaptation to the development of cosmic circumstance. The end of this race is not yet within the reach of confident prophecy.—Harry Roberts in “The New Statesman and the Nation.”