I had been reading far into the dim avenues of night, and when finally
I cast from me the _Lancet_, with all its marvellous chronicles of the
eternal battle between Science and Death, I passed into a dream-survey
of therapeutics; wherein the subject, touched by a liberated
imagination, launched me upon visions so real, so tremendous, that,
waking once more, I arose and set them down in the dawn-light.
I seemed to wander by that road along which our mighty sons of healing
will march in time to come. My phantom survey traversed the far past,
the present, the remote future; it bore me through the whole history of
medicine and surgery, of human diseases and their discovered remedies.
From the science as indicated in Homeric poetry under the ægis of
Æsculapius, to the system of Hippocrates; from the Alexandrian school
and great empiric doctrines, to Roman methods--to Pliny, Galen,
Aretæus, and other early lights--I progressed. I saw also the schemes
of Arabic medicine; glanced at the science as expounded and practised
in the Middle Ages; saw Paracelsus in his laboratory; Van Helmont, the
mystic; and Bacon, the philosopher. Still sweeping forward upon the
lightning pinions of a dream, I passed from the seventeenth to the
eighteenth century and beheld new ideas, new theories, new systems
plentiful as the sands upon the sea-shore.
A mechanical theory of disease was then the favoured conceit, and I
noted Cheyne writing his survey of fever upon that basis; I saw Mead
putting forth his treatise on _The Power of the Sun and Moon over
Human Bodies_; I examined Keill’s application of Newtonian principles
to the explanation of humanity’s physical machinery. Then arose that
mighty Boerhaave and his school; Hoffmann of Halle, with his notion of
a universal ether permeating all regions of the body; Stahl and his
“animism”; Haller, Morgagni, Cullen, Brown, and Avenbrugger--a genius
of Vienna, who invented the method by which ailments of the lungs were
first investigated by percussion.
Then, through that astounding age of miracles, the Nineteenth
Century, I passed, although to elaborate that spectacle of accumulated
achievements were vain in this place. Suffice it that at length I
reached the point whereat I closed my _Lancet_ before sleeping; and
yet, contrary to my expectations, the panoramic vision still unrolled,
still swiftly sped onwards and onwards to strange matters as yet hidden
within the void of Time to come.
Now indeed might the unfolding phantasmagoria arrest my senses, for the
Nineteenth Century was past, the Twentieth also (marked by a horror in
its midst), with many successive ages--whose tremendous records were
written and sealed--mere foundation stones, deep buried beneath the
river of the Past, for the fair structure of the Present uplifted upon
them.
I stood before a vast and imposing erection--an edifice of prodigious
dimensions towering skywards, yet without one touch of imagination
or trace of beauty. It was evidently well adapted to some enormous
utilitarian needs; but a mud-heap or modern prison had been as fair
to see. Squat as a toad it lay, yet the amazing size of it even its
unlovely fabric and ungainly mass could not conceal.
Now from this pile my attention was attracted to the crowds of young
persons who were streaming thither. The youth of the whole earth
seemed to enter its enormous gates and vanish within them. Costume had
clearly come upon a period of simplicity and earth colour. Dull beyond
description, therefore, were these tremendous processions under the
noon sunlight.
Then came one of the race of men and stood beside me and eyed me
curiously; and I inquired of him the nature of this universal festival,
and of these crowds of young men and women who entered the palace in
orderly legions.
He seemed surprised.
“Truly, you have journeyed from a far country to ask such a question,”
he answered; “and indeed your speech and raiment mark you for one from
beyond the pale of civilisation. This is Inoculation Day--the highest
festival and fête of the human year; and these you behold--the young
men and maidens--are about to receive this vital rite, each according
to his or her requirements as heredity’s archives indicate. But there
is a talk of giving all up as needless now, for the evils to be
eradicated have almost disappeared from human nature.”
“For God’s sake don’t give it up,” I said. “They did at the beginning
of the Twentieth Century. A cowardly crew, with an irrational
dialectician at their head, made Vaccination optional to catch votes
for party purposes in the House of Commons. One generation of fools
passed and were allowed to bring up their offspring unvaccinated. Then
came the Day of Reckoning. That was in the Year of the Lord 1950.
Britain suffered what she deserved; but it was an awful lesson--shade
of Jenner!--an awful lesson.”
The stranger smiled.
“That is one of the few human names still cherished from a remote
antiquity,” he observed.
“Then the great law has triumphed and of course you inoculate for every
human ailment now--is it not so?” I inquired.
He smiled again.
“Ailments? No. The need for that has long since vanished. Humanity
has no ailments now. The extremity of human life has been proved to
stand at one hundred and forty-five years, three months, two weeks,
one day, four hours, six minutes, and thirteen and two-fifths of a
second. Everybody attains to that age as a matter of course. Then
we stop, or cease, or, as you might say, die. Inoculation, pursued
through the centuries, has banished every physical ill but Death
itself; and that has no terrors at a hundred and forty-five. The
hour of extinction once known, an orderly exit naturally follows. But
surely you must have wakened from or be walking in a dream? I shall
hear you speak of small-pox presently--indeed you have done so--and
those other long-vanished curses bred out of the black night of man’s
first ignorance. To-day, however, Inoculation has climbed heights
beyond your primitive imagination, my friend; to-day--upon this glad
anniversary--the rising generation, after having been from childhood
subject to the study and scrutiny of our wisest ones, receives its
finishing touch, its crown, its keystone--each man, each woman
according to their need. _We inoculate for character now!_ Think of
all that means, if your intellect has a power sufficiently vivid to do
so. To-day we celebrate the stupendous discovery that rose naturally
out of Jenner’s sublime achievement. Evolution, proceeding through
the ages, has brought us face to face with the fact, and thus, having
counteracted heredity and stamped out disease, man proceeded into the
subtler psychological field of human character and temperament. To-day
we create disposition and mould mind. Education has done all that
education can do for the generation you behold passing in its youthful
glory before you; now the necessary correctives of character will be
administered by inoculation.”
“You can add or subtract, give or take away!” I cried; and he admitted
that it was so and gazed curiously at my enthusiasm.
“You are excited,” he said. “I am fortunate to have witnessed such
a phenomenon. The emotion of excitement has been removed from human
nature for three or four hundred years. Yet I warn you: it shortens
life.”
“Never mind that; tell me more, much more!” I begged.
“Well,” he continued kindly, “the truth is that man begins to know a
little here and there. He would seem to be on the right track--but only
just groping at the beginning of it. Of course you can perceive how
Mental Inoculation works. Given a character, the problem is where to
improve it. For generations all physical cowards were inoculated with
Courage: therefore physical cowardice is practically unknown; a rash
soul we tinge with Caution; one prone to hoard, receives the diluted
virus of Thriftlessness; a fanatical character is dosed with Common
Sense; and so forth. Indeed, Common Sense is a panacea. It is certain
that we should again relapse into the chaos of a thousand years ago but
for our stock of that. I who speak to you was inoculated with Charity.
There were fears that by some streak of atavism I might repeat the
errors of a selfish great-great-great-grandfather.”
“Do you inoculate with Truth?” I asked.
“Ah! the truth about Truth is at last determined; but only quite
recently. Human Nature has not reached the power to grasp Absolute
Truth. It exists, but no psychological chemist has ever succeeded in
securing it. A race of empirics still seek for it in secret; but they
are as mad as the alchemists of the prime. No, when Truth is reached,
æons hence, the world will come to an end and the chain be completed.
From the amorphous life-cell, from the protoplasm to Truth----but
we need not pursue that. Let me return to Inoculation Day. Upon
that notable anniversary each young human life receives a sort of
compensating balance to character; and the result is such a high level
of understanding, patience, self-control and general regularity that
the human race already begins to approach the blissful perfection of a
machine in its regularity and rapid progress.”
“And we used to say that, come what come may, human nature still
remained unalterable!”
“One of the funny persistent fallacies of the old folks in the
Nineteenth Century. It has been proved otherwise. Nothing happens now
but the expected and anticipated.”
“It is glorious--magnificent--the supreme triumph of the human mind!” I
ejaculated.
But he shook his head.
“A step in the right direction--scarcely more. Besides, there yet
linger among us people who dare to declare that there exist objections
to machine-made character. These poor weaklings seem to be the survival
of a sort of madmen common in early times. They represent the aborted
mental condition that went in its former dreadful development to
produce poets and prophets and other unbalanced creatures, including
all ‘great men,’ as they were called.”
“Geniuses, in fact.”
“That was the curious word. Great men are now not possible. A minority
of twaddlers still pursue these shadows--not in the sane spirit of the
antiquary, but with the affectation that the history and the rhymed
nonsense of those dark ages may still be read with profit to-day.”
“Then Art is dead!” I gasped.
“Happily,” he answered.
“Romance?”
“Defunct long ago. Fiction in any sort is now practically impossible,
because all life has been reduced to the glorious precision of
mathematics. Given the starting-point, the rest admits of no two
interpretations.”
“But, pardon me, I live by story-telling. It is all I am able to do. At
this moment I am putting the finishing touches to my very best----”
“Your labour is in vain,” he answered civilly. “Such things only occur
under glass in museums. Irregularity of conduct does not now enter
within the bounds of the possible. Why, even the fame of the people
who wrought your stories and rhymes is dead. We cannot understand the
dreadful and chaotic conditions in the early morning of history where
they worked.”
“Then smother your Inoculation Day!” I answered warmly. “Let me get
back into yesterday, when people had imagination, and knew a good thing
when they saw it, and--and--there, I cannot argue with you; and I
cannot change my century, like my boots.”
The man very nearly showed astonishment. Recollect that I stood before
a being who had never known hate, or love, or any sort of intellectual
excitement. Yet he came as near to a surprise then as ever he did in
his oyster-like life.
“You are very interesting,” he said. “I wish you would stop here and
permit your passions to go on mastering you until I call some of our
scientific men. It has for hundreds of years been a great speculation
as to what was the appearance of a human being when he loses his
temper. We might inoculate----”
“Oh no, you don’t!” I roared. “D’you think I’m going to have my
character tinkered with at my age by a lot of perfect, passionless
puppets?”
But here my emotions first choked me, then woke me, and I opened my
eyes, not without thanksgivings, on a pleasant morning still very nigh
the romantic dawn of the Twentieth Century.