Everyman in health and in sickness / edited by Dr. Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Everyman in health and in sickness / edited by Dr. Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nature of man, and on the meaning and purpose of his several parts. This does not mean that the mystery of life has been solved, or that we are appreciably nearer to its solution; for, as we resolve one item of mystery, five others, hydra-like, present themselves. Science, indeed, when properly considered, makes for increasing awe and wonder, that is for increasing reverence. It is a curious reflection that about himself, about his own bodily and mental mechanism, the ordinary man knows far less than he knows about his motor car. The queerest notions obtain about human anatomy, human physiology, and human psychology, even among the highly cultivated. Every kind of superstition about health and disease can find a suitable soil for its implantation in all strata of society. Almost all the knowledge that has been acquired has hitherto been confined to a small specialized section of esoterics who have formed a caste apart. The practice of medicine is inevitably a matter for trained experts; but it is obviously absurd, as it is undesirable, that Everyman, entrusted, as he is, with the driving on the high roads of the universe of the most elaborate and the most dangerous vehicle conceivable, should be in complete ignorance of the structure of the machine, of the means necessary to put and keep it in good working order, of where the brakes are situated, and of the signs that indicate the urgent need of a visit to the garage. If we are to understand even the bodily structure of man we must go back to its beginnings. The little unicellular organism, the amoeba, lives in water. It seems likely that the primal organism, of correspond¬ ing simplicity, from which man has evolved was also a water animal, presumably living in the sea of its period. It is an interesting and relevant fact that every one of the millions of living cells of which man’s body is composed to-day is also a water animal, needing for its con¬ tinued existence to be constantly bathed in a saline fluid, the composition of which resembles in many ways the probable composition of the primitive sea. In another section of this book the relation between man and his external environment are discussed in some detail. But the living units of which man’s body is composed do not for the most part come into contact with these external conditions; they have an environment of their own which, in contrast to that outside us, is markedly uniform. One of the most mysterious and wonderful things in human physiology is the elaborate and highly co-ordinated mechanism, if mechanism it can be called, whereby this internal environment is kept constant. The individual cells of our body live in a fluid medium which, for present purposes, we may regard as the blood itself, brom this they derive their sustenance and their air; into this they discharge the waste products of their activity. Although we, regarded as entities, are
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