Limanora the island of progress
appalling plagues. Not till it was found that the newer these settlers
were the more virulent were their ravages was there any chance of a
real science of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.
The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the attempts to
deplete the soil by setting tamed and exhausted specimens of their
foes to feed on it. A soil once reft of the elements that invited and
fitted any disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree from
them again. Soon by their new electro-microscopes or clirolans they
were able to classify the infinitely minute foods of these infinitely
minute pasturers on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously
though they had added to the power of human vision into the atomic
world, had been unable to advance beyond the discovery and complete
classification of the invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined
photography with electro-microscopy in such a way that every change in
the systems of their minute foes was recorded; they were able to see
the elements taken from the human system absorbed and sifted of their
nutritive powers, and the débris or manure ejected and left to poison
the human tissues; it was not the presence of the organisms themselves,
or even their destruction of essential elements that generally produced
the disease, but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clogging
the various functions. At first medical science satisfied itself with
cultivating feeble and underbred germs, and turning them loose on the
human body in order to make them exhaust the elements which attracted
their kin. Next they discovered the chemical combination that,
introduced into the body, would neutralise the poisonous qualities of
the bacterial débris. Last of all by their vimolans or photo-electric
analysers they found the exact food which attracted each form of
microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and they experimented
electro-chemically till they knew the element that, combining with this
bacterial food, would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body
as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could prescribe the
antidote to every disease that had ever enfeebled any portion of their
system. Diseases were nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space
fixing itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, upon
a living soil fat with the elements of attraction and nourishment and
yet too feeble to hold out against its ravages. They drew an analogy
from their old agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at
last the conditions which would give them the victory in the struggle
for existence and would enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriantly
as to choke all neighbours; and their old science of earth culture set
them on the way to a true medical science. They had watched with their
clirolans the selective processes of the roots of each weed, and by
various analysers had found the combination of elements in the soil and
air by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered the special
component which, uniting with its food, would deprive the weed of its
nutritive powers. Thus were they able to encourage or discourage on any
soil any growth they might select. But agriculture had been completely
superseded by their later chemistry. The best thing it had left to
their civilisation was the cue it gave by analogy to their true science
of therapeutics.
How minute and detailed was their study of the infinitesimal life of
the universe, I could not have imagined without having seen it in
practice. They had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans
that they were now discovering a still more infinitesimal world which
was parasitic on microscopic life. There had been elements and effects
at times discoverable in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the
certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again and again their
foresights had been mistaken, their calculations thrown out. Most often
was this the case on the borderland of the moral world. They had known
in their own far past history, and in the more recent history of the
other islands of the archipelago, the demoralising effect of epidemics
and plagues, especially of a new and vigorous type. For a time the
people who came within the influence of the disease seemed to return
almost to savagery. And yet every plague differed slightly from every
other in its moral results. One made the whole population thieves;
another made them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth
delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to disloyalty
and intrigue. When once their attention was called to this widespread
demoralisation after an epidemic, they began to watch the effect of
individual illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were results,
emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to be accounted for
by mere weakness of the body or irritation of the nerves, or by the
poisonous débris that the minute organisms threw off.
They invented still more powerful clirolans, which revealed an
intensity of life they had not imagined. The disease germs brought into
the human system still more minute parasites that at once attacked the
brain and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible vermin
preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they preferred another.
The therapeutic families engaged in the investigations were only just
coming to classify these moral and intellectual parasites of the
disease germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any cure for
these but the sympathetic proximity of strong and noble minds. The
look from the eyes of some of their greatest doctors, even the touch
of their hands, seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to
attenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose triumphant in
the presence of one of these wise and healing personalities. It had
been for ages the traditional maxim of polity that only the loftiest
and most advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should be
allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry into the medical
families. None were allowed to nurse the sick but the beautiful souls
of the community; their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting
heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong, the ravages
of the disease lessened. For now with their more powerful clirolans
they found that, as the brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the
parasitic, invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and
preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of their community to
keep the system of every individual at its highest point of vitality.
A loss of exhilaration in any citizen was marked at once by his
neighbours, just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation.
It was the symptom of possible disease with all its power of contagion.
The sense of active vitalisation (what we call the spirits) was the
barometer of the sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and
every Limanoran was keenly sensitive to all its changes.
In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source of the
degeneration. The specialised families of the medical council knew
where to apply their investigatory instruments. Even with their own
eyes and ears and electric sense they could often detect the exact
nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to my muddy senses
their bodies were as opaque as my own, except for a certain pellucid
light which illuminated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful,
the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute observation.
Their hearing could detect any change in the normal beat of the heart
and even the passage of the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has
told me, sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills. Their
eyes could see through the skin the delicate veinings underneath and
detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic sense could
tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the centres
or passing along the nerves. The very casing of the brain seemed to
them to be semi-transparent, and they were conscious, though dimly,
of the movements of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses
except under the microscope. Hence it was that each Limanoran had an
isolated dwelling-place for himself. It would have been impossible for
him to find rest or sleep close to the living and unresting functions
of another human system; and it was only the rhythm of the movements
and sounds of all the organs and processes which made proximity to
one another tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures over the
noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous personality; to her ear the
pulsations and other sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to
her eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were not unlike the
motions of the starry system of night; whilst the exhilaration through
the electric sense from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound
mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The nobler the soul that
she was conscious of in her neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of
proximity. It was this that made only the purest and greatest minds in
the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical families or council.
There was a curative power in their very presence.
With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the
medical sages could detect the slightest jar in the rhythm of the
system and locate it with the greatest ease. Having located it, they
knew the parasite that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or
tissue or function, and the treatment that it required. Every moral
fault had its corresponding disease and infinitesimal parasite they
held; and so rapidly could the minute organisms increase and so
impalpably and easily could they migrate from human being to human
being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times more appalling
in its ravages than that of mere physical disease. There was great
trepidation when any ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran,
and he was heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it
should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral degeneracy;
but, if the parasitic attack was found to be on one of the higher
centres of life, the alarm was great and wide, for it was far more
subtle in its insidiousness and omnipotence. The patient was at once
quarantined and only the noblest of medical sages could break his
isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the minds of his nurses
and medical attendants were concentrated on the offending tissue,
and strong thermoelectric aids were applied to it, so that it should
soon regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In the
chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special elements which would
nourish the degenerate cells and also of those that would destroy
the microbes; only as a last resort was surgery used and the part
laid open to the local application of re-agents against the hostile
organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil--passion, envy, malice,
hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity--rarely appeared in grown men and
women at that advanced stage of their civilisation. They had become
diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul was passing
through the primitive phases of the development of mankind. They were
the ailments of childhood and youth; and hundreds of the Limanorans
now grew up without once experiencing any one of them. When they did
appear, isolation was the first step; and the parents or proparents
could generally cope with the moral disease without having recourse to
a medical family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of cure was
applied most vigorously, for they shrank from the thought of leaving
any seed of the contagion in the system to germinate at some later and