DR. KOCH'S DISCOVERY.
THE first interest of Dr. Koch's discovery consists, for us, in the extraordinary sensation it has caused. The German people, both at home and in Austria, seem to be all agog with excitement. A hundred thousand copies of the professional journal containing Dr. Koch's expository lecture, which was as dry as he could make it, were sold within two days of its appearance. Not only are the doctors from every part of the Empire swarming into Berlin to study the process and obtain lymph, but the people in every town and village are hymning the great bacteriologist as a benefactor to the human race, and proposing through a thousand channels that the Emperor or Parliament should pay him some special public, honour as one who has illustrated the German name The Emperor himself has ordered Bills to be prepared creating " colleges " for the preparation of the lymph, and the education of military doctors in its application, the German Army, which camps out without tents, being specially liable to all forms of tubercular disease. Even the Bourse, though not usually given to philanthropic emotion, has been deeply stirred, and some of its members, with characteristic foresight and still more charac- teristic callousness, have scented money in the discovery, have formed a Company to work it as a monopoly, and have offered Dr. Koch a great sum for the sole possession of his secret, an offer peremptorily refused. No such excitement has ever previously accompanied the discovery of a medical remedy or preventive; for the Jesuits ascertained the pro- perties of quinine before the era of excitements, Dr. Jenner had to struggle against a mass of prejudices, one of them religious, and Dr. Pasteur's specific for hydrophobia is even yet only partially believed. The excitement is the more remarkable because so little has as yet been con- clusively proved as to the range of the discovery. It would seem to be, at all events, exceedingly probable that Dr. Koch has found a specific for the cure of lupus ; but, horrible as that disease is, it is comparatively so infrequent that few laymen are aware of its ravages, and the body of the people are not conscious of apprehending its attack. On the other hand, though phthisis is dreaded in every household, and is held in especial horror by the Continental poor, who valae strength before all things, there is no certainty that the lymph will either cure it or protect those inoculated against their chance of suffering under its effects. Dr. Koch thinks it will, and he is a sufficiently great authority to justify experiment upon a large scale ; but until those experiments have been made over a considerable period of time, the consumptive and their friends can only be permitted to entertain a novel hope. The Germans, however, like the English of to-day, are under a conviction, not only that " science," by which they mean experimental curiosity, is as yet only beginning to make its conquests, but that all its conquests must be beneficial, and are as ready to believe that Dr. Koch has extinguished tubercular disease, as the English were to imagine that Mr. Edison had extinguished gas. Moreover, they are, we imagine, penetrated with the idea, which has hardly yet reached our own middle class, that the future triumphs of medicine will not consist so much in what we regard as " cures," as in strengthening the constitu- tion to resist the attacks of dangerous disease ; that, in fact, disease is to be beaten, as small-pox has been beaten in Ireland, by various and early methods of inoculation. Every new victory or attempt in this direction seems to them a harbinger of ultimate success, and they grow in their enthusiasm so transported that the more excitable among them are ready to declare that disease has been vanquished, and that the human race is about to commence a new career of perfect physical health. It is this preposterous exaggeration which has stirred one or two German and Austrian professors to deliver lectures which seem to Englishmen gratuitous and slightly absurd cautions, but which have upon their special audiences a sobering, and therefore, decidedly beneficial effect. We are all very proud of the superior calm and phlegm of the Teutonic breed; but the families springing from that great race, including the English and the Americans, are liable, whenever their imaginations and their interests are moved together, to furious bursts of transport, in which, so long as
they last, judgment and experience are alike placed in abeyance, and those who retain their heads feel as if they were dealing with children wild over some new toy. Such raptures are very short—if they were not, the problem whether a race could go mad would soon be solved by ex- perience—but while they continue, no one who strives to moderate them throws away his words.
We shall not, we fear, either extinguish disease, or make men so healthy that its attacks will not signify any more than visitations of chicken-pox, measles, colds, or mumps, and we are not sure that, if we could, life would become so much happier as many sanguine physicians expect. Pain impairs the enjoyment of life undoubtedly, men habitually forgetting, except in their words, its educative effect in producing caution ; and the extinction of some diseases, of which cancer perhaps is the best known, would reduce the aggregate of that para- lysing terror in which, though there must be ultimate good,
man is unable to perceive any. But men do not greatly fear disease any more than they fear death, the immense majority going through life without ever giving it a thought, and while mental pain would be but slightly reduced, physical pain would not be extinguished even in the region which medical science covers. Bacilli do not cause accidents, nor are most of the sufferings against which we enlist surgical skill preventable by any conceivable system of inoculation. Some men might become more joyous, but the race as a whole, and considered over a long period, would miss one source of its continuing energy, in losing the mighty and many-bristled besom which sweeps away the feeble. It is not disease only which impairs the happiness of humanity, but the existence of the weaknesses upon which disease can fasten, and the naturally weak would be preserved to rear up broods of children tainted with their inherent im- perfections. No scheme of inoculation will banish scrofula, or the internal malformations which produce so many dis- orders, or congenital debility, or the liability to benignant tumours, to blindness or deafness, or that strange hereditary tendency to die early which is the despair of physicians, marks so many families, and has given rise to so many legends about inherited curses and vicarious punishments for blas- phemy or other sins. The survival of all the unfittest to extreme old age could not in the end enlarge either the happiness or the energy of mankind ; while the enormous place which would be taken in the general life by senility must distinctly sadden it. Nobody even supposes that the candle would not burn out at last, or that man, unlike any other living thing in creation, would retain all faculties to the very last ; and the world would be full of the slowly decaying,—of men, that is, whose almost stagnant existence was imposing on the young, not decades but half-centuries of waiting. Nor would the physical loss be the only one, for there would be an enormous decrease not only in sympathy, but in the capacity for feeling it. We are not disciples of Helvetius, and know well that many men can feel for suffering which can scarcely visit themselves ; but it is certain that through enormous classes there exists an incapacity for sympathy which disappears in the presence of disease. Half the servants in the world become admirable in the face of illness which they comprehend—recondite illness worries them—and Scott, in his famous lines, quoted till their sense has half been lost, attributed to all women a hardness which melted at once at sight of pain. We do not know what a perfectly healthy race would morally be like—for savages are not only not abnormally healthy, but have singularly weak constitutions, dying like flies under unaccustomed diseases like measles or sore-throat—but it is not in the healthiest specimens of the race that we first expect the virtues that are distinctly Christian. That, no doubt, is an argument for moralists, not hygeists ; but even the latter would admit that to let all trees flourish is not the way to produce the finest timber. We are bound, we suppose, to prohibit and prevent disease as far as we can, without think- ing of consequences too far off for us to hope to control them ; but the results of our success, should we succeed, may nevertheless be disappointing. Dr. Koch, if his dreams come true, will be a benefactor to a million families, for it is a peculiarity of phthisis that it fastens for the most part upon the loveable ; but he may not be equally a benefactor to the enduring species. The waste of Nature, though it seems so appalling, must still be ordered of supreme wisdom ; and one of its objects, at least, is the elimination of the unfit whom the extinction of disease would only tend to preserve.
Previous page
