The Beginnings of Disease

Abstract

I am fully aware of the excellence of this occasion. I even more appreciate the small part I have had in its formation. Such an event as this, the 27th Annual Banquet of the Radiological Society of North America, is not the consummation of the labors of one man but of many men, working many hours a day for many years-a quarter of a century of united effort. There have been those far-seeing scientists, exemplified by such personages as the Orndoffs, the Soilands, and the Stevens, the Carmans, the Pfahlers, and the Ernsts, who have realized that it is not sufficient to merely have a national society but rather that such an organization has a responsibility to its members and to the people, and who have given of their very life blood to perfect this ideal. To those men with such a vision and to the leaders of today with the willingness and resolution to carry on, to the Radiological Society and its members, I extend my greetings. Our world about us is a wonderful but a fearful world. Among its myriad activities there is a group of silent forces known as natural processes or as Nature. These processes, this system of activities, are both wonderful to contemplate and fearful to know. They create only to destroy. Atomic particles are put together to create physical bodies and taken apart to destroy them. In other words, Nature has both creative and destructive forces, and immediately upon the creation of any physical body destructive forces are set in motion which will eventually destroy it. Nothing seems to escape this ultimate end unless it is the component parts of the atoms, the matter-energy particles. The trees, the plants, the earth, the planets, must all meet the same eventual end. This state of things, which has the power to give both joy and happiness, illness and death, has produced the physician. Into this environment of natural processes is placed the human being . We usually assume that the infant or young child is a physiological unit with properly balanced physiologic activities for growth and development. This is not the case. The infant and young child have no more an ideal physiologic state for growth and development than the mature adult has for continual life. The child of today is the adult of tomorrow. The physical qualities of the child are known as its anatomy and the changes taking place from infancy to adult life are the progression of this anatomy. Seldom, if ever, are the activities of the anatomical structures in such a state of equilibrium that they are neither progressing or receding. There is never a condition of complete rest. Even in the genes of the ovum and spermatozoa the forces of nature are already beginning to influence the future life of the human being.