The Nature of Man's Structural Imperfections¹

Abstract

I. BETWEEN the activities of Archdeacon Paley and those of Élie Metchnikoff lies the greater part of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of that century we find the Archdeacon extolling the perfections of the human body—just as Celsus had done sixteen centuries before him² By the close of the nineteenth century the alert and fearless brain of Elie Metchnikoff had discovered, or believed it had discovered, that the human body was blemished by many imperfections. The evangelist of this new and startling doctrine approached the study of man's body by an untrodden pathway, one made possible by the advancing science of his day. On his arrival at the Institut Pasteur in 1888, being then forty-three years of age, he set himself to investigate the means by which the human body combats and keeps at bay the swarming hosts of micro - organisms which find a natural habitat in its internal passages and recesses. He saw man's body as a battlefield-the scene of a perpetual warfare-and as his investigations proceeded, the conviction grew on him that the chances of the body's success were imperilled by a heritage of structures which had become out-of-date and useless. In the Wilde Lecture given before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, on April 22, 1901, he declared that man “was Being killed by his intestinal flora,” and that his great intestine had not only become useless but was also a positive and continual menace to the rest of his body. He believed that the stomach itself, and also part of the small intestine, could be dispensed with. Early in 1903 appeared “Etudes sur la nature humaine,”³ in which Metchnikoff greatly extended the list of man's structural imperfections.