DIFFERENT KINDS OF .TREATMENT. 395 



1. Preventive treatment. The science and art of preser- 

 ving health, is known as Hygiene, and it is manifestly founded 

 on an accurate knowledge of physiology. If we thoroughly 

 understood physiology, and had unlimited power over the 

 forces of nature, we might so preserve health that disease would 

 be unknown. Unfortunately, we have neither this knowledge 

 nor this power except in a small measure, and hygiene is cor- 

 respondingly imperfect ; but as far as it goes, hygiene renders 

 therapeutics unnecessary. 



Another form of preventive treatment is prophylaxis. This 

 is something more than simple hygiene or preservation of 

 health ; it recognises the causes of disease at work, and 

 either avoids them or counteracts them by anticipation. 



Prophylactic treatment may be either negative or positive : 

 a man may guard against infection by avoiding certain things, 

 such as water which is poisoned by cholera or typhoid fever ; 

 or he may have himself vaccinated to prevent small-pox, take 

 quinia to prevent ague, or drink lemon- juice to prevent scurvy. 



2. Immediate treatment. When hygiene and prophylaxis 

 are powerless or cannot be employed, the case comes into the 

 hands of the therapeutist. The organism is disturbed, deranged, 

 or diseased, and now there is an occasion for therapeutics, 

 for remedy, for relief, or for cure. All these terms manifestly 

 imply a necessity for interference, that is, the actual presence 

 of derangement from the normal state, and they introduce 

 us to our own proper subject. 



a. Removal of the cause. Having met with a case of 

 disease which we have failed to prevent, we first naturally try 

 to remove or destroy the cause, and thus restore the normal state 

 "We extract a foreign body from the finger, or a poison or 

 indigestible meal from the stomach ; we neutralise an acid by 

 an alkali ; we kill parasites. In doing so, we simply follow 

 nature's second method of recovery. Now there are manifestly 

 as many ways of effecting a cure as there are causes of disease. 

 We may alter the food, and then we say the treatment is 

 dietetic ; we may alter the atmosphere, and then we say the 

 treatment is climatic ; or we may employ the chemical and 

 other substances contained in the Pharmacopoeia, when our 

 treatment will become medicinal. 



b. Symptomatic treatment. If we fail to remove the morbid 

 influence, we may attempt to neutralise or counteract its morbid 

 effects on the body. Knowing the physiological action of many 

 different measures, we select such as act in an opposite direction 

 to the morbid cause, and employ them to counteract it. As a 

 method of treatment this is manifestly much inferior to the 

 preceding ; we are now striking not at the cause of disease, 



