This is the final dictum of medical Science on the subject—­Science which however, adds nothing to our knowledge and leaves us still in darkness and uncertainty, while memory brings a well known couplet to the mind: 

  He holds the threads of Wisdom’s way
      Loosely, with palsied hand. 
  Why lacks he now, for pity’s sake,
  The grace to understand?

  M.B.

  (After Goethe.)

But let us weigh this long list of symptoms and estimate their respective significance by the light of physiological perception.

The ever present fever is due to stagnation of the blood.  Swelling of the spleen is caused by catabolism of the Malpighian bodies.  Albuminuria is the result of cold in the Plexus renalis; Perspiration is due to numbness in the nerve fibrils.  The inclination of the mucous membranes to Hemorrhage is explained by congestion of blood in the capillaries, due to lack of vigor in the nerve fibrils.  When the nerve fibrils fail to act, the capillary circulation stops and the blood overloaded with carbonic acid presses against the walls until they burst.

The complications and after effects are explained in the following manner: 

Complications in the respiratory system are all due to failure to properly treat the acute stage of the disease, and where the resistance of the patient has been sapped they usually end fatally.  Complications in the circulatory system are subject to the same explanation as fever.  Digestive complications are due to impaired metabolism brought on by loss of energy in the Vagus nerve.  Complications in the nervous system are consequent upon the degeneration of the whole Vagus tract.  Sensory complications are due to the disease attacking the “minoris resistentia,” the point of least resistance in the patient.

This explanation of the real significance of the symptoms of Influenza should make it sufficiently apparent that its cause is fundamental, widespread and deeply rooted in the organism—­a menace not to be lightly and tentatively treated with impunity.  That the disease is not one that may be met—­with any prospect of success—­with febrifuges, drugs, serums and specifics—­to say nothing of whisky and the like futilities, to use no harsher term, such as are said to have characterized the prescriptions of a very considerable proportion of the Regular Medical Profession and with such terribly disastrous results.  What the liquor statistics show on our side of the line I am at the moment unable to say, but I see it reported in the press of an adjoining province that under nominally strict “Prohibition” the sale of liquor had increased no less than 900 per cent, largely upon doctors orders, and that the sales from the Government stores in one city, during the past month had totaled $50,000—­as compared with $6,000 for the corresponding period of the previous year.

The Professor’s elaborate diagnosis, from a physiologico-chemical point of view seems rather to point to a meaning which he has missed—­to indicate a latent, more remote possibility behind the shy bacillus, as the primary cause of the disease.