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grew on him that the chances of the body's success were imperilled by a heritage of structures which had become out-of-date and useless.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.
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References
The Lloyd Roberts Lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine on November 16.
See "Evolution of Anatomy", by Dr. Charles Singer (1925), p. 50.
An English translation, edited by Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, was published in 1904 under the title "The Nature of Man" (Heinemann).
In 1907 Metchnikoff published a further work, of which an English translation appeared in the same year, edited by Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, under the title "The Prolongation of Life". In this Metchnikoff replied to his critics and produced more evidence in support of his thesis. Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane formed the opinion that the great intestine was a useless and dangerous structure independently of Metchnikoff; so also did Prof. Barclay Smith (see an article on the nature of the caecum and appendix by the present lecturer in the Brit. Med. Journ. 1912, vol. 2, p. 1599).
See "The Adaptational Machinery concerned in the Evolution of Man's Body", NATURE (Special Supplement), August 18, 1923, p. 257; and "Concerning the Rate of Man's Evolution", NATURE, August 29, p. 317.
Lancet, 1919, 2, p. 959.
Prof. Louis Bolk, "The Part played by the Endocrine Glands in the Evolution of Man", Lancet, 1921, vol. 2, p. 588. See also Keith, "The Evolution of Human Races in the Light of the Hormone Theory", Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1922, vol. 33, p. 195.
The reader will find a summary of the anatomical evidence relating to the nature of the appendix, caecum, and great bowel by the lecturer in the British Med. Journ., 1912, vol. 2, p. 1599.
Lt.-Col. R. McCarrison, "Faulty Food in Relationship to Gastrointestinal Disorders", Lancet, 1922, vol. 1, p. 207. Other references to Lt.-Col. McCarrison's researches will be found in this paper.
Dr. W. Cramer, Lancet, 1921, vol. 2, p. 1202; 1924, vol. 1, p. 636.
Dr. Doris R. Crofts, Proc. Zool. Soc., 1925, Part I., pp. 101, 170.
I have not mentioned the excretory function of the colon. This has been investigated by Dr. Owen T. Williams, see Brit. Med. Journ., 1912, vol. 2, p. 1281.
British Journal of Surgery, 1914, vol. 2, p. 306.
J. Mawas, C.R. Acad. Sci., 1922, vol. 174, pp. 889, 1041.
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KEITH, A. The Nature of Man's Structural Imperfections1. Nature 116, 821–823 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116821a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116821a0