Excerpt from General Pathology: An Introduction to the Study of Medicine, Being a Discussion on the Development and Nature of Processes of Disease
An effort has been made in the following pages to bring together, in what I hope is a concise and at the same time comprehensive, connected and readable form, those facts and considerations upon which modern pathology rests.
Care has been taken to impress upon the reader that pathological processes are not to be regarded, as they often enough are, as a personal conflict in which man defends himself by a special endowment with purposeful processes of defense.
Pathological definitions and conceptions unfortunately still abound in metaphysical and teleological ideas, even though it is sixty-two years after Virchow's effort to lift pathology to the rank of other sciences.
Thus the student is easily misled in his conceptions of pathological processes and he frequently separates what he has learned in biology and physiology from his pathological studies and ideas.
My purpose, therefore, was to convey to my readers that pathology must be approached within the frame of modern biology, and that in the study of disease, no less than in the study of health, scientific vision is possible only if we divest ourselves of all metaphysical and teleological conceptions of use, harm, defense, vital forces, conscious purpose, etc., and treat pathological processes entirely as expressions of physico-chemical laws.
We must, in other words, with Kant, lay down the rule that the mechanical method, by which natural phenomena are brought under general laws of causation and so explained, and without which there can be no proper knowledge of nature at all, should in all cases be pushed as far as it will go, for this is the principle of "determinant judgment."
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