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deficient cause: they are employed without any reference to the 

 cause of disease, either sensible or inferred. The causation of reme- 

 dies which is insensible or imperceptible, and which is not to be in- 

 ferred by rules of analogy, may be expressed as latent. To extend 

 a little our consideration of these classes respectively. 



1. The known examples of agents which produce effects by 

 direct relation with the cause of disease are few, and are chiefly con- 

 fined to the means of operative surgery. It is, however, possible 

 that some medicines may operate in this way insensibly, or where the 

 cause of disease is not suspected, and where the properties contained 

 in the remedy and corrective of this cause, are not known. In order, 

 however, to restore health, the assimilating healthy state of life must 

 be restored, which is seldom or never the case with palliatives, 

 forming chiefly the class of medicines here hinted to operate in the 

 direct manner; as a violent pain in the bowels may be suspended by 

 a dose of laudanum; but the pain will perhaps return, which would 

 not be the case if the laudanum restored health by the direct causa- 

 tion which produces in every respect the state of health. The 

 laudanum only produces a change in the condition of the disease, 

 the result of which is the mitigation of pain, &c. The remedies 

 which are known to cure by removing the cause of disease are 

 related not with primary, but with secondary, or the effects of 

 primary disease. 



2. Medicines that remove the cause of disease by intermediate 

 relations. These remedies are mediately related with the conse- 

 quences of primitive disease, and cure the diseases dependent upon 

 the re-action of these consequences, or the continuance of such 

 causes. Thus mercury, by merely quickening the circulation (to 

 specify a possible mode), may remove biliary obstruction, and the 

 phenomena would cease which are dependent upon such obstruction: 

 thus also purgatives remove worms, the presence of which may have 

 occasioned epilepsy; but neither the biliary obstruction nor the 

 worms would have been formed without that previous change of 

 the slate of health, which we have called predisposition. The 

 jaundice ceases and the epilepsy ceases, because an agent is employed 

 which mediately removes the causes upon which these remote con- 

 sequences of primitive disease depend. The remedies of this class 

 may cure primary disease ; but this does not happen by the removal 

 of a known cause, simply for the reason that the cause belonging to 

 the properties of life is not to be known. 



3. Remedies which cure by latent causation. Remedies which 

 operate in this way do it by directly supplying or removing unknown 

 properties, &c. or by accomplishing this end indirectly, or by 

 mediate relations. They rarely, if ever, accomplish this work of 

 restoration directly, as above remarked. We infer this from the 

 fact that the state of health does not immediately succeed the exhi- 

 bition of the remedy, which it should do if this remedy directly 

 removed or supplied a property which was differential in comparison 

 with health. The only answer which can be made to this remark w. 



