THE JOURNAL OF PHARMACOLOGY. 275 



resistance exercises, or to look after the giving of tlie bath, there are 

 plenty of people — and among his professional brethren there are any 

 number — who are quite ready to say, "Yes, Mr. A. is a very good fel- 

 low, most kind and attentive, but is he not a bit of an old woman?" 

 Experience teaches that more credit is gained and less responsibility 

 is undertaken by ordering some medicine and leaving the patient to 

 fight it out as best he may than by personally undertaking physical 

 treatment. The patient feels that the practitioner is acting "just like a 

 London physician," and what more can anyone desire? So the phy- 

 sic bottle and the pill box still reign in the land, as the sign and the 

 emblem of orthodox medicine ; all of which is very wrong. 



Disease may be treated in several ways. First, there is the ex- 

 tremely ignorant, totally empirical, but sometimes extraordinarily suc- 

 cessful method, which we may call the alterative plan ; a method allied 

 to the common trick of giving one's watch a good shake if it does not go. 

 One gives the poor man a strong pill, or a Turkish bath ; if he is fat one 

 starves him, or if thin one gives him a course of overfeeding; while a 

 lazy man one sets upon a bicycle with thirty miles a day before him. 

 Any way, one gives him a good shake-up, and so great is man's vitality 

 that very often he is all the better for it. Of course we have no sym- 

 pathy with this sort of treatment, notwithstanding the fortunes which 

 come to those who carry it out in an impressive manner. Then there 

 is the treatment which depends for its success upon the fact that many 

 of our diseases are due to toxic n materials of one sort and another, and 

 that some of these materials can l)e either neutralized or removed by 

 drugs. This is at least "scientific." It fairly smells of the test tube 

 and the laboratory ; and, moreover, it is easy, for difficult as it must be 

 to discover a real antidote to these various hypothetical toxins, it is by 

 no means difficult to persuade both oneself and the patient that one 

 has got hold of the very thing. Then there are many other methods 

 according to which bottles of medicine may be Ijrought to bear upon 

 disease, and lastly, there is the line of treatment which aims at re- 

 moving the toxins, at sweeping out the "effete materials'" by which 

 disease is caused, and at "stimulating normal function," partly by 

 ahering the physical environment, for example, !))■ the application of 

 heat, light, electricity, water, vapor, etc., and partly by the use of move- 

 ments and exercises, by aid of which the dift'erent parts of the body are 

 made to react upon, or "stimulate" each other. Such physical thera- 

 peutics, however, mostly require apparatus, and so, smell of quackery 

 —such are the restrictions imposed upon our practice by the gold- 

 headed-caie ideals of medical life — or they are suggestive of masseuses, 

 medical rubbers, and bathmen, people with whom etiquette and even 



