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causation, or by a series of related processes. I am not conscious 

 of any medical agent that ever has been employed, or that can be 

 employed, with any view, or any mode of operation, which is not in- 

 cluded in one or other of the preceding divisions. We have now 

 to consider something of the laws which regulate the results of the 

 operation of those remedies, concerning which we have no further 

 experience than that they are capable of affecting the condition of 

 disease, by intermediate or related processes. 



1. Primary disease in all instances consists in a change, or modi- 

 fication of the principle of life, compared with the state of health. 



2. Primary disease is a state of the principle of life compatible 

 with its assimilation; and in this way it is maintained. 



3. Secondary disease may be maintained after primary disease 

 has ceased. 



4. Secondary, or rather consecutive disease, may be maintained 

 in two ways after the primary disease has ceased : 1st, if such is the 

 relation bettfeen the life of different seats, the influence of the 

 primary upon the secondary may be to produce a modified assimi- 

 lating state of it, as if a sxvelled testicle should follow the irritation, 

 of an injection, and degenerate into schirrus, long after the urethra 

 has resumed its state of perfect health; 2nd, the consecutive disease 

 may be maintained by an effect of the primary, which does not arise 

 out of a direct relation between vital properties, as when primary 

 disease changes the textures or the secretions, or produces foreign 

 substances, &c. The consecutive disease of the spirit may then be 

 maintained by these causes, and these causes being removed, it ceases, 

 because the relation of their properties with the spirit is not to pro- 

 duce a modified assimilating state of it. These causes, or effects of 

 primary disease, may be distinguished as the material occasional 

 causes. 



5. But primary disease may maintain consecutive disease by 

 direct relation of the properties of the principle; and this secondary 

 state continuing only so long as the primary lasts, the properties pro- 

 ducing the secondary disease may be distinguished from those pro- 

 ducing a modified assimilating state, as the occasional spiritual 

 causes of disease: as when the respiratory organs are disordered by 

 pressure upon the brain, as by bone, and resume their natural state 

 of properties when this pressure is removed. 



6. Every disorder of the spirit which is not maintained by the 

 occasional material causes, is maintained by assimilation: for if the 

 disorder should be of the secondary kind, and does' not assimilate in 

 its seat, it is dependent upon a disorder which assimilates in some 

 ether seat, the present sum or quantum of the spirit requiring to be 

 perpetually renewed, and acknowledging no other source than that 

 of assimilation. v 



7. Remedies operate either by removing a known cause or by 

 latent causation. It is an object in medical investigation to discover 

 the cause of disease ; for though every internal cause which we are 

 capable of knowing must be a consequence of previous disease, being 



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