The Vegetative Nervous System in Relation to General Medicine.

We are just beginning to realize, after manv s-ears of study in pathological anatomy, which has heretofore been considered the basis as well as the superstructure of modern medicine, that it fails to explain those conditions which are of most interest to the clinician.1 Pathological anatomy may acquaint us with the changes in tissue which are produced by the disease process, likewise the changes which result from it; but the gap between these two has been left unbridged. It can be bridged successfully only by an understanding of biochemistry and pathological physiology. After many years of close study, we are confronted with many facts which we are unable to explain; largely because our field of investigation has been too narrow. The agencies through which the disease process produces its effects throughout the body, have not been sufficiently investigated. In order to understand this phase of medicine, we must realize the manner in which the workings of the human body are controlled. The various controls may be classified under sensori-motor; physiochemical; and psychical. Disturbance in any of these controls alters function and produces functional pathology or a pathological disturbance in the normal physiology. It is to a better understanding of these various controls of the body that medicine will address itself in the immediate future. They have been omitted heretofore because of their general abstruseness. Our knowledge has been so slight that we felt our inability to understand them; but now that we have advanced in our study of normal physiology; and now that we better understand the pathology underlying disease processes and the effects of the disease processes in body tissues other than those in which the main lesion is located, we are able to trace the relationship between the two in a way that we were unable to do heretofore. The field is not so difficult as would seem at first thought. Many independent observations have been made and many fundamental truths have been already discovered, which, when put together, will greatly elucidate the subject. It will be necessarv, however, for medical men to address themselves to this phase of medicine with the same earnestness and the same eagerness for truth, as they have addressed themselves in the past to the problems of physiology, pathological anatomy and general laboratory study. The pleasure in the study of disease comes from our ability to explain the phenomena observed; and not until' we are able to think in terms of