THE RESISTANCE OF THE PATIENT AS A GUIDE TO OPERATIVE PROCEDURE

I. INHERITED LONGEVITY  The unit of the human body is the individual cell. The absence of resistance by these individual cells to those influences which lessen or destroy their power for the reproduction of cells like themselves, in its last analysis, means death. The relation of these individual cells, which in the present state of our knowledge is unknown and unknowable, to premature impairment or destruction is the real conservator of life, and we speak of its highest manifestation as inherited longevity. The usually accepted proposition is that the various manifestations of disease—acute and chronic—are but the effort of natural laws making for recovery.Just how far these supposed recuperative processes may proceed without compromising the safety of the patient is of the highest importance, and this is the problem which demands answer by the physician and surgeon when he decides on the course he will pursue, for on his