CURING BY COMBATING THE CAUSE. 285 



ization of simple non-poisonous means of cure 

 needs therefore the use of only small quanti- 

 ties of any remedy and consequently necessi- 

 tates that treatment should be applied as soon 

 as possible. The same is true of every causal 

 method of healing disease. 



The " specificity " of curation by means of a 

 chemical substance may be due to the fact that 

 such a substance acts as a disinfectant only 

 upon certain " species " of microbes or parasites, 

 or it may lie in the fact that such a substance 

 acts as a stimulus upon certain body-cells of 

 the human organism. After what I have set 

 forth in the preceding chapter I need hardly 

 explain that I use the word " specific " in this 

 sense only in a very general way in order to 

 express any degree whatsoever of close relation- 

 ship between substance and cell. There can 

 here be no question of a strongly specific action 

 in the dynamic sense, of an interchange be- 

 tween molecule and molecule. Chemical sub- 

 stances therefore, that act antiseptically and 

 " specifically " upon parasites may be able to 

 exert such an action not merely upon a single 

 species of parasite ; nor have we cause to sup- 

 pose that they act as a stimulus to only a sin- 

 gle set of body cells. At times indeed " speci- 

 fic " substances may even exert a harmful 

 action when given in the " specific " disease. 



