454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE EEMEDIES OF NATUEE. 



By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 

 NERVOUS MALADIES. 



HYGIENIC pathology, or the plan of curing the disorders of the 

 human organism by the aid of the remedial agencies of Nature, 

 is founded on the fact that disease is not only a wholly abnormal con- 

 dition, but that, within the years allotted to the individuals of our 

 species, there is a strong healthward tendency in the constitution of 

 the human system, which tendency does not fail to assert itself as soon 

 as the predisposing cause of the disorder has been removed. In the 

 treatment of consumption and scrofula, the principles of this theory 

 have been generally recognized ; but I believe that their application to 

 the nervous diseases {asthenia, neurosis, chlorosis, hysteria, nervous 

 debility) is destined to effect a still greater reform in the present sys- 

 tem of therapeutics. 



The study of biology is largely a study of hereditary influences. 

 In the form and structure, in all the peculiar life-habits of each or- 

 ganic being, we can trace the outcome of ancestral transmissions, and, 

 as a general rule, the persistence of such peculiarities corresponds to 

 the length of time during which the influence of their causes was 

 impressed upon the character of the species. The period of artificial 

 civilization, even if considered as coeval with the era of recorded his- 

 tory, is but a moment compared with the ages during which man-like 

 creatures, the ancestors of our domestic animals and the prototypes of 

 our cultivated plants, existed in the warmer zones of our planet. After 

 six thousand years of cultivation on parched hill-sides, the vine is still 

 by preference a tree-shade plant. After many thousand generations 

 of cats have been fed and petted in daytime and neglected after dark, 

 puss is still a night-prowler. Barn-yard fowl have still a predilection 

 for thorny jungles, and in the plains of Russia the descendants of the 

 mountain-goat climb wood-piles and cottage-roofs. In the constitution 

 of all organic beings there is a tendency to revert to the original life- 

 habits of the species. Biologists have long recognized the significance 

 of that law, but its hygienic importance has hardly begun to be under- 

 stood. For it implies not less than this : That the vital functions of 

 every living being are performed more easily and more vigorously 

 under the conditions to which the constitution of its organism was 

 originally adapted. A swamp-boa may subsist for years in a dry 

 board cage ; eagles have been chained to a post for a quarter of a cen- 

 tury, and lost the gloss of their feathers, their vigor, their courage, 

 though not their lives. No drugs would cure the ailments of such 

 captives ; but restore them to their native haunts, and see how fast 



