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Now nearly ninety per cent. of the wounded are able to
continue in the service. The reason for this improvement is that
medicines are now being made to order instead of being gathered "from
China to Peru." The old herb doctor picked up any strange plant that he
could find and tried it on any sick man that would let him. This
empirical method, though hard on the patients, resulted in the course of
five thousand years in the discovery of a number of useful remedies. But
the modern medicine man when he knows the cause of the disease is
usually able to devise ways of counteracting it directly. For instance,
he knows, thanks to Pasteur and Metchnikoff, that the cause of wound
infection is the bacterial enemies of man which swarm by the million
into any breach in his protective armor, the skin. Now when a breach is
made in a line of intrenchments the defenders rush troops to the
threatened spot for two purposes, constructive and destructive,
engineers and warriors, the former to build up the rampart with
sandbags, the latter to kill the enemy.


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