ism we show that disease is only to be regarded as a modification of healthy normal life, as a phase or manifestation of life, which is wholly subject to the laws and the current of life, and that it demands the most sober observation.

To stimulate study along these lines is the object of our exhibit. That it may do this is the fond hope of your committee.

Discussion.

Dr. Evans: I knew when Dr. Nolte began to speak that, despite his modesty in what he said about not having a paper, he would have, nevertheless a good one, because I have had some experience in what the doctor could do. The inception of this pathological exhibit was due entirely to our president. The suggestion came from him and it was through him that we have an exhibit this year. He put it in the hands of a committee of whom Dr. Nolte was chairman. But the doctor was just as modest then as he was in this paper to-day, and it was only after I wrote President Neilson and told him that I believed this pathological exhibit was simply to be an exploitation of the two Milwaukee schools, that he awoke to an interest in the matter. Then a good exhibit was produced, as I think you will all agree.

I believe this exhibit ought to be made a permanent feature of our meetings, and to bring the matter before the society, I move that it is the sense of the Wisconsin State Medical Society that the pathologic exhibit be made a permanent feature of our annual meetings.

THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF SYMPTOMS.

BY HERMAN GASSER, M. D., OF PLATTEVILLE.

"How do you feel?" Very well, thank you. We all understand this. Nothing is more simple and common than this every-day salutation. We have only met an average healthy normal friend, one whose physiological functions are so equilibrated, the consensus of which we call feeling well. But the moment we begin to ask: What is this feeling well; what is this normal physiological function, we at once open up the flood-gates of the entire world of knowledge; and thus, with one question, demonstrate that this simple and common salutation we all understand so well is the problem of the ages; the science, religion and philosophy of the world. But don't get frightened at these high-sounding terms, for we shall confine our remarks to the study or analysis of symptoms purely as they present themselves to us in our every-day experience.

Our friend feels well; he has just eaten a hearty dinner, and his stomach, the result of its increased tension and function, is uppermost in his general feeling. If he should feel hungry it would remind him it is dinner-time and direct his conduct. This would be equally true if he felt a distention in the rectum or bladder; and thus we might cite examples innumerable of how the varying changes and functions of the body constantly and continually change the feeling, the symptoms, and this because it is the sum or measure of our bodily functions. As these are ever changing in their various relations from moment to moment, so are the symptoms of our feelings; and if our body is a physiological and anatomical machine governed by physical laws into a unity of related functions, then our feeling too is governed by the same unerring laws and must also be a mechanism of which

the symptoms are only expressions of the organized anatomy and physiology of feeling. Indeed, it must be the machine, for it is not only the measure of our complex bodily functions, but also regulates, directs, and adjusts them into the related unity of life.

This is all simple enough for we experience it every moment of our conscious life; it is a natural process. But what interests us more, is the fact that our feeling is not only the mechanical measure of the functions of our bodies, but of the entire universe of phenomena of which we are a related part. Indeed, if this was not true, there would be no feeling of a related duty. If all the functions of the body worked with uniform constancy and relation there would be no feeling, for feeling is the measure of their variations of relation. This holds equally true with the world without, and thus binds it all into a related unity in our feeling the unity of nature. Let us illustrate:

His relation with the

Our friend feels well, he is normal. entire world is as agreeable as his bodily functions. His wife and children are happy; his business is prosperous; the markets have gone his way; his friends are legion, because men love the happy, healthy and prosperous. Nevertheless this same feeling causes him to be ever alert and on the watch that sickness, ruin and disaster, wind and wave, earth and sky, light and darkness, fire and pestilence may not mar it, and hence is never fully complete, although normal.

This is of our friend who feels well. His body is normal and the world is normal as interpreted in his feeling. This means that all the forces of nature react in harmony, comfort or equilibrium to him. This also means that each fact in his conscious experience or feeling, like the wind and wave, the wife and child, is not a special entity but a related part of the outside world and as much so as his heart, lungs and liver are related parts of the body, and all special facts or symptoms in the general unity of feeling. The system of relation in the world with

out and within is the same reality of which the unity of feeling is the measure. We can no more conceive of a special state of conscious feeling like, for instance, the child, except as related to the general body of feeling, than we can think of the child in the world outside, except as a repeated part in it. "Every thing or quality felt," says Prof. James," is felt in outer space. It is impossible to conceive a brightness or a color otherwise than as extended and outside the body. Sounds also appear in space. Contacts are against the body's surface; and pains always occupy some organ."-Prof. James, p. 15.

Our friend feels well. He receives a telegram stating his child has been accidentally shot in the abdomen. He feels badly and the thought of his child is the central feeling around which a great variety of related feelings like pain and death hover, and gradually shades out into the general feeling in which it is set and makes it all sad alike. What is the therapeutic suggestion to cure this grief? You cannot remove the cause and hence you must treat it as a general infection that must run its course. Sup port it with kindness, sympathy and hope, rest and time; for if the lesion in the feeling is local, it must readjust and repair it to the general body of feeling; just as a broken leg or a typhoid infection would have to readjust itself to the body in general.

But if this feeling with its symptoms is a mechanism governed by physical laws, how did the news of his child's injury which occurred one hundred miles away, affect him so? The accident was observed by the senses, adjusted in the brain into feeling and transmitted by volition through the telephone to the telegrapher, carried by the messenger to him, and by the sense of sight to his brain, where it was interpreted into the general body of feeling without a broken link in the physical continuity. The same forces that sent the telegram also called the doctors. The problem before them was very complicated and involved. General principles and universal experience in abdominal sur

gery demonstrate that a laparotomy is a safe procedure with one exception. In gunshot wounds of the abdomen general experience negatives general principles. A greater proportion recover without surgical interference. This is not only true in civil practice but it is the experience in the Spanish-American war. General principles say-operate. Experience says-let it alone. Which are they to follow? They had absolute faith in general principles when fully carried out, and believed the result of this special experience was caused by an incomplete development of its details. They at once prepare for operation. Finding the intestines perforated and knowing the tissues immediately surrounding these perforations must be bruised, devitalized, and probably infected, they curetted or cut it away, closed the wound, and fortunately had an uninterrupted recovery. The shock and pain and the local injury walked arm in arm, the one the measure of the other. The doctors were good mechanics. Experience taught them that uniaded it would lead to death, that increased disorganization of the local injury would cause increased states of painful feeling, and the repair of the one the mending of the other. But more, they not only saved the child but restored it to the parents, cured their anxious and painful feeling and made them extremely happy and grateful. Greater work than this no man has ever performed.

Our friend who feels well during the night comes to feel badly; he is nauseated, distressed, has sharp pains in his abdomen, and calls the doctor to get relief. The doctor finds that the painful center is located in the right groin, and which he has lately learned, the result of centuries of study, is appendicitis. The feelings always were accurate in measuring this changed and natural process, but it took man all these ages to trace it from effect to cause. Having once learned the relation between the local process and the feeling, the therapeutic principle suggests itself, for we have here a useless organ, the removal of