HUMAN IDIOSYNCRASIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3846, 16 December 1936, Page 11

HUMAN IDIOSYNCRASIES

AN INTERESTING STUDY. 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 day-labourers 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 entitles, to be excluded or exorcised. The financial success of the oldtime family doctor depended very largely on 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 found on demonstrable realities? We know that our minds and our emotions differ enormously both in quantity and in kind. We know, also, 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 differences exist among the physical infinitesimals of which our bodies are made up. Bio - chemical rsearch has proved the correctness of this pre-supposition; and it seems clear that our chemical differences are as definite 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 beasts, 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 diseasa as texternal 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 moral and of aesthetics. A writer in the “Edin-' burgh 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 body and mental organisation to the circumstances which environ him. Have we fully realised the pace at which developments have taken place in the environmental circumstances themselves? Human ingenuity has, in 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 circumstances. The end of this race is not yet within the reach of confident prophecy.