IT IS PROVERBIAL that a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer. It is not proverbial that for the question-asking fool there is some hope and for the others, none. Now it is my intention on this occasion to play the fool awhile, to ask a great number of questions, and I cordially invite you to join me in this game.
I want to inquire into The World of the Rheumatic Child, into his internal as well as into his external world, or, as Claude Bernard has phrased it, into his milieu interieur and into his milieu exterieur. Now there is some method to my folly, and it amounts to this. We know a great deal about the disease rheumatic fever and about its devastating effects within the body of its victim. But we do not know a great deal, indeed only a very little, about the victim within whose body the disease effects its devastations. I said—we know a great deal about the disease itself. In preparation for this talk I "re-surveyed the literature" and I found it, as I have known it to be, not only enormous in quantity but most impressive in quality. It is literally studded with masterpieces of etiologic research, of clinical surveys, of pathologic studies, of follow-up surveys, of epidemiologic analyses, and of therapeutic enterprises. In my review of the literature I came upon some old and esteemed friends whose works I had witnessed "in the making," the studies, for example, of Wyckoff, and those of Alfred Cohn; Claire Ling's penetrating statistical analyses, Pearl Raymond's biologic speculations, May Wilson's classical and encyclopedic résumé of knowledge—and upon a host of others, too numerous, really, to catalogue.
Future etiologic research in occupational cancer.
