2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



says Dr. Jennings, " and also in your grave and more distressing affec- 

 tions, to regard the movement concerned in them in a friendly aspect 

 designed for and tending to the removal of a difficulty of whose 

 existence you were before unaware, and which, if suffered to remain 

 and accumulate, might prove the destruction of the house you live in 

 and that, instead of its needing to be ' cured,' it is itself a curative 

 operation ; and that what should be called disease lies back of the 

 symptoms which, in fact, are made for the express purpose of remov- 

 ing the real disorder or difficulty " (" Medical Reform," p. 310). 



Drugs can rarely do more than change the form of the disease, or 

 postpone its crisis. Mercurial salve, which conscientious physicians 

 have almost ceased to regard as a lesser evil of any alternative, was 

 once a favorite prescription for all kinds of cutaneous diseases : it 

 cleansed the skin by driving the ulcers from the surface to the interior 

 of the body. A drastic purge counteracts constipation for a day or 

 two by inducing a still less desirable state of artificial dysentery. 

 Combined with venesection the same " remedy " will suppress the 

 symptoms of various inflammatory affections by compelling the ex- 

 hausted system to postpone the crisis of the disease ; in other words, 

 by interrupting a curative process. The best way to " assist " Nature 

 in such cases is to give her fair play by forbearing to meddle with her 

 restorative methods, and by removing the predisposing cause of the 

 disorder. Diseases plead for desistance, rather than for assistance, and 

 the discovery of the cause is the discovery of the remedy. For there 

 is a strong upward and healthward tendency in the constitution of 

 every living organism : Nature's revenge is but an enforced condition 

 of peace. Pain, discomfort, and even the premature loss of organic 

 vigor, are the attendant symptoms of a reconstructive process, and their 

 permanence is a presumptive p>roof that, in spite of such admonitions, 

 that process is a struggle against a permanent obstacle, or against a 

 constantly repeated frustration of its efforts. 



To this self-regulating tendency of the living organism, certain dis- 

 orders (the lues veneris, prurigo, etc.) probably due to the agency of 

 microscopic parasites oppose a life-energy of their own, and have 

 thus far resisted the influence of hygienic or non-medicinal remedies. 

 But, with that exception, it may be laid down as a general rule that the 

 virulence and duration of every disease are proportioned to the degree 

 and the contumacy of the provocation a retribution proportioned to 

 the degree of the guilt, we should say, if Nature did not administer 

 her code after the principle that ignorance of the law constitutes no 

 excuse. The ignorant mother who, with the best intentions in the 

 world, forces her child to sleep in an air-tight bedroom, incurs the pen- 

 alties of an inexorable law as surely as the vicious father who tempts 

 his child to a life of infamy. 



In the aggregate, hygienic errors cause more mischief than hygienic 

 recklessness ; and, if we would know the most baneful of those errors, 



