of investigation. However favorable results may be reached in it, it seems practically clear that preventive immunity, even when we have gained sufficient experience in it, will be conferred only against those infections to which many men are likely to be exposed—such as small-pox, measles, possibly scarlet fever, whooping-cough, inflammation of the lungs, diphtheria, and enteric fever; in the time of approaching epidemics, as cholera, influenza, and typhus and relapsing fever. On the other hand, it is extremely improbable that preventive measures of immunity will be adopted against rabies, anthrax, and tetanus. The problem of warding off and removing the causes evidently exists in the greatest possible comprehensiveness, and in the most diverse other conditions, but its working is not so strikingly manifested in them as it is against bacterial infections.
While art is limited, in the curing of pathological processes, by the impossibility of changing the course of life at pleasure; while it also reaches limitations in warding off disease, yet its function is not exhausted; there still remains to it the extraordinarily important work of treating symptoms. An inconceivable number of pharmaceutical preparations look directly to this purpose. In numerous cases, also, the application of burning and bath-cures, of electricity, and many other therapeutic helps, is made for the same end. The importance of this part of the art is not underrated. It is often indifferent to the patient whether these or those anatomical and functional changes take place; he will have no perception of them, will not be disturbed by them in his capacity or have his life shortened by them. But symptomatic treatment often makes natural cure possible; it bridges over dangerous episodes in the course of the disease. And no person to whom intelligent management by a physician has preserved a dear one will think little of the treatment of symptoms.
In this the healing art is not only capable of extraordinary progress, but is actually advancing in an encouraging degree. Since Griesinger lamented, thirty years ago, that the doctor was helpless in the heat of fever, we can now, by the cold-water treatment and a number of strong antipyretics, keep a typhus patient almost continuously at the normal temperature. Recent years have furnished numerous soporifics and antiseptics, pilocarpine and cocaine and others, and the present is equally fruitful in the introduction of symptomatic methods. Everywhere active life, fresh labors; and, amid all of it, every human existence which comes to a premature end, every person who is hampered in his career by chronic disease, admonishes us that here are the limits of medical art. Some of these barriers it will never raise; at best, it will be able only to push them further on.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Pharmaceutische Rundschau.
