Excerpt from Measure, Vol. 4: Spring 1941

The author probes the world of chemicals in the service of health and discovers the interesting facts contained herein. One need not be of the clan of scientists to profit by these paragraphs; these items should appeal to every student.

It is not a matter of indifference what theories we hold respecting ourselves and the world around us. Inevitably our lives and our daily actions are swayed by what we believe and what we imagine. In no department of human life has this been more completely and in some ways more terribly demonstrated than in the changing opinions of man kind about the nature and cause of disease. Through these changing opinions of different men we have thereby stumbled upon some great discoveries.

All living things are forced to go through life beset by enemies that are constantly seeking to destroy them. Sometimes they defend them selves by physical methods, and are equipped to do this by means of weapons, such as horns, teeth and claws, or by such defensive armor as shells, hides and furs. But to a much larger extent the defense is chemical, although usually the chemical defenses are not so obvious as the physical defenses. But here is where the chemical term, chemotherapy, comes into play. Chemotherapy aims at the destruction of invading germs through the administration of chemicals which, while being sufficiently injurious to the germs, must also be relatively harmless to the organs of the patient. The discovery of such chemicals, strange as it may seem to the layman, is one of the most difficult tasks confronting the medical research worker. And this for the simple reason that all chemicals are more or less injurious to the animal body. It is indeed a matter of great surprise that many centuries ago the prevention and remedy of the most serious diseases were known, although these discoveries were made by more or less intuitive efforts to utilize vegetable and mineral products for the cure of diseases. It was only with the perfection of the microscope in the latter part of the last and the beginning of the present century that science has discovered the causative organisms of these diseases.

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