For ages men have sought the answer to the question, what is disease?" Today it is generally admitted that this question cannot be answered. They are now content to say, "disease is a departure from health."

The secret of this mighty enigma, for whose solution the whole world has sought, has been shouted from the house tops for over a century and has been staring in men's faces for the whole of that time, so that it is impossible that they could have failed to learn the truth had they not shut their eyes and stopped their ears against it.

Men early conceived disease to be a thing or entity foreign to the living organism, and making war upon the vital powers. It was an enemy which should be counteracted, subdued, destroyed, exorcised--"cured". The ancients (and most moderns) conceived of this enemy as an evil spirit or demon; the self-styled scientific moderns conceive of the enemy as a malignant germ. Spirit invasion was called possession or obsession; germ invasion is called infection.

The fact that the "attack" theory was framed in an age when primitive ideas and mythologies, now completely consigned to the limbo reserved for exploded myths, constituted the philosophy of mankind, naturally militates against the truth or probability of the hypothesis in question. Being a primitive imagining it would be most likely a wrong and untrue one. Yet, in this age of science, we still employ the language of the "attack" theory.

"Disease" is said to attack us; to run its course; to run through a patient; to travel from one place to another; to settle in some organ of the body; some "diseases" are said to be very malignant, and others very mild; some yield easily to treatment, others persist obstinately despite all "science" can do; the patient must be supported through the disease, or supported while the disease runs its course. There is much talk of resistance to disease and about immunity to and susceptibility to disease. One is struck down by disease as by an avenging angel. It seizes him as does a roaring lion or consumes him as does a fire. A man is said to have died of a heart attack; or he has an attack of pneumonia or of typhoid. We read of an outbreak of measles, small-pox or cholera. Medical books speak of the onset of disease. Disease is man's greatest enemy, or a thing with which the doctor and the boards of health are in constant warfare. We must combat an enemy whose every move is dark and malicious.

Our whole terminology is a hang-over from the days when evil spirits caused "disease". Whether malignant spirits or malignant germs, it makes no difference; we are "attacked". Some evil spirits were very malignant, some evil germs are very malignant. We cannot escape the conviction that our conceptions of "disease" are those of the troglodyte. Hence, we are still fighting with a fictional entity.

Jennings says, "In the improved light of human physiology, reason and experience conspired to show that the common idea of disease was a great bug-bear, an illusory figment of the darkest portion of the dark ages; and that the combined expedition of medicine of all ages, all countries, and of all descriptions, that had been, and is yet arrayed against this spectre, and in hot pursuit of it, through veritable living human flesh and blood, was the most tremendous and quixotic movement that had ever been engaged in by deluded mortals. ***"--Philosophy of Human Life. p. 36.