In such a terrible disease as cancer our pessimism is not always justified. A friend of mine operated on a patient with severe abdominal pain and found a cancer at the stage where surgery could not help. He merely sewed up the wound and for at least a year after the patient was free from pain and apparently doing well. Operations never dreamed of a few years ago are now being done routinely on the lungs, heart, and blood vessels. For long, we have said that we assume more responsibility in refusing operation than in doing one. We hardly have to argue that now.

Leukemia, a disease of the white corpuscles, is considered deadly and yet a few years ago a near neighbor of mine lived on for well over a quarter century after her diagnosis had been proved. Childhood diabetes was quickly fatal until insulin was discovered in the early nineteen-twenties. Some of the earliest children to get insulin are now nearly middle aged and still doing well. Some of us doctors, who have been attending our tumor clinic since its beginning, are greatly cheered when a patient whom I will call Mary makes her yearly visit. She is now an attractive woman of forty-two. When she first came to us as a lovely girl of seventeen an operation showed that she had a bad type of tumor at the back of the neck and close to the spine. Another operation and two radium treatments, followed by skin grafts, were necessary and then a growth in the chest appeared, which was treated by X-ray. Yet for a dozen years now Mary has been in good health with no symptoms of trouble.

And so it goes. New methods of hygiene, new drugs, new types of operation, and what I think fully as important, new knowledge of physiology, are accomplishing great things, as you can see from all the health statistics. Thus you have a concrete basis for being optimistic, and it is easier now to approach health problems in this way.

Yet even before all these new developments had come to our aid, the will to believe had been a strong factor in our favor. We are beginning to understand, although not too clearly, that the brain, working in conjunction with the pituitary and adrenal secretions and probably more indirectly with other bodily forces, has made cheerful determination a strong factor in combating our internal enemies as we have always believed it did in physical strife.

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GENERAL HEALTH