62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



certain plants often gave comfort and apparently often helped the sick 

 man to recover. So arose the more materialistic cure of disease and 

 the profession of physicians. 



By those who studied disease from the more material standpoint 

 many theories were devised to explain the phenomena displayed by the 

 sick. The lack of knowledge of the minute or even the gross structure 

 of the body and its working in health, necessarily made all these 

 attempts at explanation more or less crude and imperfect. Every con- 

 ceivable " cure " was tried from age to age, and, no matter what the 

 means employed, whether gold or clay, sassafras or tar water, whether 

 the patient was bled or whether sharp hooks were applied to his flesh 

 in order to " draw out the humors," always a certain percentage of 

 patients recovered from the disease and survived the treatment. For 

 the time, at least, the " cure " was apparently justified by the results, 

 and held its place in practise until a change of theories or an unusually 

 long list of failures threw it into disrepute, and it was relegated to the 

 list of things which " have been used but are now found of little value." 

 The more obvious causes of disease — intemperance, exposure to heat 

 and cold, exhaustion, etc. — were early connected with certain forms of 

 bodily ailments, and even diseases like malaria were known to depend 

 somewhat on local conditions of living, but it is only within recent 

 years that such common affections as pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, 

 etc., have been found to have a tangible cause working within the body. 

 With the discovery of bacteria and their poisons there still remained 

 the questions, What is disease? Why, even in times of plague, are 

 some persons exempt? and why do certain persons recover and others 

 succumb even with the same treatment? 



We can no longer look upon sickness as due to the presence within 

 or without us of an evil-natured personality. We must reverse the idea 

 and say that disease is the manifestation of a good consciousness within 

 us, a consciousness which seeks to maintain life by endeavoring to rid 

 the body of a harmful material presence. We realize through abnormal 

 sensations that we are sick — that the body has undergone a change from 

 the condition of health, but within us is a more elemental intelligence 

 of which we are not aware, an older body-mind which, whether we sleep 

 or wake, and even before we are born into consciousness of self, looks 

 after the highly complex and interdependent structures on which life 

 depends, constantly directing its complicated affairs with unerring faith- 

 fulness. Disease may be said to be the effort made by the body, directed 

 by this deeper mind, in its attempt to rid itself in most appropriate ways 

 of whatsoever it finds harmful to it, or that threatens its destruction. 

 A fit of vomiting, in which the conscious mind takes a passive and even 

 unwilling part, is but the wise attempt on the part of this inner con- 

 sciousness to rid the body of that which it finds to be harmful. In the 



