62 PHE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
certain plants often gave comfort and apparently often helped the sick 
man to recover. So arose the more materialistic cure of disease and 
the profession of physicians. 
By those who studied disease from the more material standpoint 
many theories were devised to explain the phenomena displayed by the 
sick. The lack of knowledge of the minute or even the gross structure 
of the body and its working in health, necessarily made all these 
attempts at explanation more or legs crude and imperfect. Every con- 
ceivable “cure” was tried from age to age, and, no matter what the 
means employed, whether gold or clay, sassafras or tar water, whether 
the patient was bled or whether sharp hooks were applied to his flesh 
in order to “draw out the humors,” always a certain percentage of 
patients recovered from the disease and survived the treatment. For 
the time, at least, the “cure” was apparently justified by the results, 
and held its place in practise until a change of theories or an unusually 
long list of failures threw it into disrepute, and it was relegated to the 
list of things which “ have been used but are now found of little value.” 
The more obvious causes of disease—intemperance, exposure to heat 
and cold, exhaustion, ete——were early connected with certain forms of 
bodily ailments, and even diseases like malaria were known to depend 
somewhat on local conditions of living, but it is only within recent 
years that such common affections as pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, 
etc., have been found to have a tangible cause working within the body. 
With the discovery of bacteria and their poisons there still remained 
the questions, What is disease? Why, even in times of plague, are 
some persons exempt? and why do certain persons recover and others 
succumb even with the same treatment? 
We can no longer look upon sickness as due to the presence within 
or without us of an evil-natured personality. We must reverse the idea 
and say that disease is the manifestation of a good consciousness within 
us, a consciousness which seeks to maintain life by endeavoring to rid 
the body of a harmful material presence. We realize through abnormal 
sensations that we are sick—that the body has undergone a change from 
the condition of health, but within us is a more elemental intelligence 
of which we are not aware, an older body-mind which, whether we sleep 
or wake, and even before we are born into consciousness of self, looks 
after the highly complex and interdependent structures on which life 
depends, constantly directing its complicated affairs with unerring faith- 
fulness. Disease may be said to be the effort made by the body, directed 
by this deeper mind, in its attempt to rid itself in most appropriate ways 
of whatsoever it finds harmful to it, or that threatens its destruction. 
A fit of vomiting, in which the conscious mind takes a passive and even 
unwilling part, is but the wise attempt on the part of this inner con- 
sciousness to rid the body of that which it finds to be harmful. In the 
