Delirium Cordis

A heart-to-heart talk on certain problems in present day cardiology in the light of ancient and recent history.

¹ The Department of Medicine of the College of Medicine of the State University of Iowa.

The laymen in this audience little know their many helpful functions in supplementing the physician's efforts. He is usually called too late and can bring too little to be of complete usefulness. His patient is scared, threatened with pain, with loss of income as well as the cost of illness. Fear of economic disturbances delays treatment and restricts its scope. Few physicians can confine their practice to diseases they can cure with virtuosity and finality. As doctors we live lives of incessant compromise. The practice of medicine is a selection from a sad series of second best choices. In his studies, his plans and aspirations of what might be done, the good physician looks to the laymen for help, moral and fiscal. On behalf of all the physicians whom your earnest collaboration has inspired and whom your thoughtful contributions have aided directly, I wish to thank you as laymen with my warmest thanks for the stimulus of your benefactions.

You have, by your corporate efforts and instinctive sense demonstrated the capacity to foster the sturdy advance of knowledge and welfare. It is an endeavor which is humane and good. But these constructive acts only emphasize the further duty to understand all the wide ramifications, the subtle as well as the evident implications of what we are about. For a just and wise combination of heart and head is our only hope of fulfillment among the snares and pits which beset us on all sides. I cannot give you a map or guide book. But perhaps it is well for us all to recognize that man is at a nodal point in his long journey, and that nodal point happens to be a jungle.

Many of the animals which we know have existed on earth have disappeared, generally because their rigid overspecialization prevented them from adapting to some unexpected and radical change in environment. Man, as a social organism, has survived and flourished because, in his often clumsy way, he has been able to adapt. But nature makes no allowance for illusions. Man is the first and only creature whose survival on the globe is to some extent within the reach of his own thoughtful manipulations. But weakness or uncertainty or stupidity does not get a second try in nature. Even a cheerful and optimistic person should ponder the question of whether man can escape the responsibility for thinking or abuse the results of his thinking and the less objective but no less real aspirations and yearnings of his spirit. For in recorded evolution the price of failure is extinction. And busy nature will turn her hands to other tasks.