How Old is Disease?Source: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 16, No. 6 (Jun., 1923), pp. 669-670Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/6332 .

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 669

Although there is little likelihood at present that such a complicate( process will come into use here sc long as our oil wells continue to flow it is reassuring to know that wher they do run out we shall not be alto gether deprived of the efficient fue that has made the auto, the airplane and the motor boat possible. We should not know how to get along without the paraffin, vaseline, lubri eating oil and innumerable othe, petroleum products that enter int( our daily life. Mineral oil contaim so many such valuable substalnces that it is a pity to burn it up in running steam engines where other fuels ma- serve. As petroleum gets scarcer, w( nmay expect to see the burning of th(

HOW OLD IS DIISEASE ? THERE is a curious belief still lin-

gering in the popular mind that dis- eases came in with civilization; that primitive men and animals lived in a state of perpetual health and died a natural death-though it is hard to see what is meant by "natural'' in this sense. Even Mrs. Charlotte Per- kins Gilman, who is very much of a moidernist, falls into this folk fallacy, for in her poem on "'the little Eohippus" she makes the cave-man prophesy:

WVe are going to wear great piles of stuff

Outside our proper skins! We are going to have diseases!

And accomplishments! ! and sins! ! !

"It was a clinching argument to the Neolithic mind,'" but really it was not so. The Neolithic manl was all too familiar with diseases and doubtless had also his accomplish- menits and sins. He suffered from rheumatism and "cave gout" and toothache, for caverns are danmp and chillyv lodgings. He shared the clis- eases as he did the lodgings of the cave bear and saber-toothed cats. The earliest human bones, if indeed they can be called human-those of the ape-man who lived in Java somiwe half

million years ago, bears the marks of a painful malady. The skull of the Dawn Man of Piltdown, England, a hundred thousand years old, is de- formed by disease.

The men of the Stone Age must have suffered frightfully from head- ache for they allowed the tribal doctor to cut holes in their skulls with flint knives to let out the demon that was causing the pain. And if the patient was not cured or killed by this treatment he sometimes tried it again when he had another head- ache. Dr. Roy L. Moodie, of the University of Chicagc, in his new book, "'The Antiquity of Disease," says: "A few ancient skulls reveal five cruel operations, which had all healed. The patient had survived them all. But he suggests that since this custom of trepanning was practiced most commonly in Peru the patient may have had the relief of a local alnesthetic in the form of a few leaves of coca, the plant that gives us cocaine.

But eons before the human era the dumb animals had to endure all manner of diseases. The dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era had "misery in the bones I '-and such bolnes as they were! You have seen them in the museum. It must have been worse than a giraffe's sore throat. "Pott's disease"' was doing its wicked work millions of years before Dr. Pott was born, though this sounds like an an- achronism. This is shown by the dis- covery of backbones of saurians that had been stiffened by tuberculosis. Tumors are to be seen on reptile skeletons buried in the rock chalk of Kansas, and broken bones showing signs of bacterial infection have been found as far back as the Permian of Texas.

Geologists have to depend mostly upon bones for their knowledge of ancient diseases since the softer parts do not leave fossil remains, but the stems of crinoids in the coal fields are found bored into by worms and it is apparent that the mollusks,

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670 TIIE SCIENTIFIC IMONTHLY

crustaceanis andcl plants of earlier ages were afflicted with parasites and other pests.

The earliest ancl simplest forms of plant auid aniimal life, the bacteria and protozoa, seemii enivious of la.ter arrivals anid wage perpetual war on them to this clay. The larger anii- mials prey upon the smaller, but so dlo the smaller upon the larger, and the imost clangerous of beasts of prey are the littlest. When manl appeared oni the planet he found the microbe lving in wait for him. Soonier or later, we all fall victims to the lower forms of life, and, after dleath, if niot before, become the food of our inlvis- ible enemies. Even Tut-Ankh-Amen, embalmed annd entombed for the per- petual preservation of his person- ality, will ultimately be gatherecl iiito the recurrent cycles of common life.

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS WE l recorcl with regret the cleath

of Arthur Gordcloni Webster, for niore than thirty years professor of physics in ClaIk University;

of Schuyler Skaats WVheeler, presi- clent of the Crocker-Wheeler Comi- paily of New York, cdistinguished as an electrical engineer; of John Venin, presidcent of Caius College, Cam- bridge, eminent for his work on logic aild later for his archeological re- searches, and of Charles Emmanuel Forsyth -Major, the English paleon- tologist.

AT the meeting of tlhe Natioiial Aeadeemv of Scienees helcl in Wash- ingtomi oii April 25, Dr. A. A. Michel- son, professor of physics in the Uni- versity of Chicaigo, was elected presi- dlent in successioni to Dr. Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smith- sonian Institution. Dr. J. C. Mer- riamn., presidcent of the Carnegie In- stitutioii of Washington, was elected vice-presidcent in succession to Dr. Michelson.

SIR DAVID BRUCE has beeil niou- iiated by the council as presidenit of the British Association for the Ad- vanceneint of Science at its meetinlg iiext year in Toronito.

I '/1~~~~~~~

frl

EVOLUTION AND TI-lE SCHOOL as seeii by the Dallas Moro,ting News for April 17, 1923, before the meetinig of

,the Fundamentalist Coiferenee at Fort Wortlh. Texas.

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