You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
MY THEME, which is foreshadowed in the title, might lead along two distinct paths. I mention one of these only because I may have been expected to follow it. I refer to the fact that the natural bodily processes tending towards health and towards a resolution of illness have become more than a little obscured by the recent flood of advances in chemotherapy. It is indeed difficult for a house physician at the present time to find out by experience what a child does with pneumonia with no more help than the good nursing which, thirty years ago, was the only treatment. Today, and we all agree about this, even a boil must not be allowed to take care of itself. I feel that in the best of the medical schools the teaching does include a reminder that children lived through illnesses before penicillin and that even today it is the child and the living tissues that ultimately bring about a restoration of health, not the antibiotic.
I have not followed this important trail because this theme has been developed with great competence in various addresses to medical students by physicians who remember the bad old times, and who see that from the teaching point of view the bad old times could claim some points in their favour. My theme follows another path which in the end will, I think, prove to be a related one, since again it concerns the natural tendency towards health and the use that we can make of this tendency as doctors. In the psychological field the principle that there is a natural tendency towards health or developmental maturity is one which has a particular significance. It could be said that much of physical disease is due to an invasion from the environment or to an environmental deficiency, and is not a purely developmental disorder. By contrast, psychological disorder can always be described