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MINOR MEDICAL MYSTERIES By Leonard Williams The physical and psychic personality of Dr. Leonard Williams is disarming to the would-be critical reviewer. If Dr. Williams has followed his own hygienic rules, and liVed up to his own sanitary doctrine, his sustained vigour of mind and body provides good prima facie evidence of their soundness. But he would be the first to admit that more important, as a factor in the promotion of health and longevity, than any formal
rules of hygienic conduct is the art of selecting wisely one's parents and grandparents ; for, in his preface, he justifies the
title of his book (Cassell, 5s.) by stating that " all biology is a profound mystery, and that human physiology is the profound-. est mystery in biology." Those familiar with the author's writing will know in advance that they are sure of finding some crisp and characteristic aphorisms. Dr. 'Williams has a lot of bees in his bonnet, and he makes little effort to restrain their buzzing ; but nearly everything he says is personal, vigorously dogmatic, and healthily prejudiced. In other words, there is a lot of wisdom in this little book, which more than balances the occasionally irritating repetition of information that today has become almost a universal possession. The author is perhaps a little over-cynical in hiS attitude to recently- acquired medical knowledge. " It is a humiliating thought," he writes,". that all these labours expended in the interests of health, successful in their own particular sphere to a degree which suggestS the miraculous, should remain almost com- pletely barren so far as the major objective is concerned." He considers that the explanation of this relative failure lies in the fact " that all new knowledge has been applied to the cure of disease, and not to the cultivation of health." To the impartial 'looker-on, this seems a little short of accuracy. It is true that curative medicine has not victories to its credit comparable with the enormous advances that have been made in the understanding of the subtle mechanisms of the human body and mind ; but the victories of preventive medicine during the last half-century have been spectacular enough. We may agree that middle-aged and old men and women are as little free from ailments as ever they were ; and that the span which marks the limit of human longevity has not been extended ; but, surely, it is something to the good that a much larger percentage of us, as a direct result of deliberate sanitary precautions, reach the plateau of middle-age than ever before in our history. All the same, it is well, in these days of official and professional complacency, to be reminded of the fact that unanalysed statistics give but a partial view of human' well- or ill-being.
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