The German Aerztetag
(Concluded from page 631)Following Steffer, Prof. W. Hellpach, Ph.D., M.D., of Heidelberg presented a paper on "The Bases and the Limitations, the Fulfilment and the Degeneration, of Federal Medical Care of the Sick." If one is to take a just attitude toward the controversy in regard to health insurance and hopes to launch reforms based on correct principles, Hellpach stated, one must consider the final, philosophical, and abstract bases of disease. In time of sickness, the tragic disharmony between purely natural causality and the moral sense of the people is brought out in a very peculiar and impressive manner. Sickness and death often exclude entirely any manifestations of the senses; on the other hand, sickness often brings a deep purification; with its approach, essentials and nonessentials become distinctly differentiated. Moral fulfilment is separated from mere sensuous fulfilment of existence. The province of the physician appears, at