Pain, rest, and inflammation, then, are protective devices, guarding our bodies against injuries. It seems certain that the greatest injuries sustained are the results of infection. Our chief infections are from bacteria, animal parasites, and viruses.

Probably most of you think of bacteria as little “bugs” causing disease. You are mostly wrong. In the first place they are plants; and secondly, the different kinds of bacteria in the world are as the sands of the sea, and only a few kinds cause disease. The others have useful jobs and animal life could not exist without them.

Somewhere about the time of our Civil War, Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, showed that fermentation and putrefaction always were caused by living organisms. If I remember rightly, the first disease that he showed to be produced in this way was a blight attacking silk worms. Quickly after that, many diseases attacking human beings were shown to be due to bacteria, a particular kind producing each disease.

These latter bacteria are called pathogenic, which means disease producing and they attack only living tissue. They have been well advertised. Probably less well known to you are the saprophytic, which work only on dead organic matter, that is, plants and animals, and break it up. If it were not for them, the whole world would soon be buried in dead matter.

Innumerable are the good deeds done by bacteria. Collecting nitrogen is one of the chief of these. The animal body is largely protein, and the distinctive thing about protein is that it contains nitrogen. The supplies of nitrogen on the earth are limited but the air is mostly nitrogen. Certain bacteria collect this air nitrogen for the plants and then it comes automatically to us.

Even in the body there are many bacteria that do us no harm but are actually necessary for our health. One of the bad things about the modern antibiotic treatment is that not only the disease-producing bacteria are killed off but also the helpful ones suffer at times the same fate with bad results for us. One unfortunate fellow that I know was given penicillin and for some weeks was miserable with a sore throat and cough. After a heavy steel instrument was put through his mouth and throat and a piece cut out of a vocal cord, it was found that, the normal bacteria having been killed off, the yeast took that opportunity to grow in abundance and irritate him.

So you see that you must be careful how you condemn and chastise whole groups, either of people or bacteria.

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GENERAL HEALTH