THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DISEASE. 369 



few words from us, for really the thought occurs, Whether, experi- 

 mentally, we know how soon diseases would cure themselves, if they 

 were left to nature ? No observations have been made upon sick 

 people visited by the physician, who has made up his mind to have 

 nothing to do with them, but only to use his gray eyes. 



It is a mistake to think that there is such a thing as the natural 

 history of disease ; it has none but a human history — either benig- 

 nant or terrible. Man as he lies stretched on his pallet, is still both 

 a soul and a body; he does not grow, or show, like insensate wood 

 or bark, in any direction. If you are there to heal him, he takes 

 good out of your frame, sympathy and skill, even though you pour 

 bad out of your bottles ; he feels the warmth of a brother, present as 

 the envoy of one of the arts of heaven. And if you give placebos, 

 you are still acting upon him by the inevitable medication of your 

 person. But if he finds you at his bedside, to watch him for cold 

 experiments' sake, that his life, death, or throes may figure in your 

 statistics, do not suppose that you are innocuous, for you are a potent 

 poisonous drug, calling forth sorrow, despair, fear, and other de- 

 stroyers, and aggravating the sensibilities of his organs. The best 

 feeling that you can cause under these circumstances, is indignation, 

 which, as it rouses the life, may be remedial in your teeth. But 

 there is an absurdity involved in the question, What would be the 

 course of disease if left to itself ? — because it never can be left to 

 itself without a breach of manhood ) and even if it occurred on a 

 desert island, the mind of the sufferer would play an important part 

 in determining the illness towards either death or recovery. The 

 brutes know better than to resign themselves to doing nothing under 

 natural afflictions : they lick their sores, and seek their herbs ; and 

 the domestic animals bring their sorrows of this kind to man, and 

 assume a kind of patience under the treatment that he enjoins. The 

 record of cases requiring care, and yet to which no care was given, 

 would constitute, so far as it could exist, the unnatural and inhuman 

 history of disease. 



We therefore reckon that any medical practice which has had a 

 few precedents to correct it, is better than that profession of nothing, 

 to which some of our brethren have directed their hopes. Yet it is 

 equally true that many cases would have recovered better by simple 



