Preventable Diseases | Page 2

toy, the gyroscope car, will respond to pressure exerted or weight placed upon one side by rising on that side, instead of tipping over. Let the onslaught of disease be sufficiently violent and unexpected, and nature will fail to respond in any way.
Moreover, we and our intelligences are a product of nature and a part of her remedial powers. So there is nothing in the slightest degree irrational or inconsistent in our attempting to assist in the process.
However, a great, broad, consoling and fundamental fact remains: that in a vast majority of diseases which attack humanity, under ninety per cent of the unfavorable influences which affect us, nature will effect a cure if not too much interfered with. As the old proverb has it, "A man at forty is either a fool or a physician"; and nature is a good deal over forty and has never been accused of lacking intelligence.
In the first place, nature must have acquired a fair knowledge of practical medicine, or at least a good working basis for it, from the fact that the body, in the natural processes of growth and activity, is perpetually manufacturing poisons for its own tissues.
In this age of sanitary reform, we are painfully aware that the most frequent causes of human disease are the accumulations about us of the waste products of our own kitchens, barns, and factories. The "bad air" which we hear so frequently and justly denounced as a cause of disease, is air which we have ourselves polluted. This same process has been going on within the body for millions of years. No sooner did three or four cells begin to cling together, to form an organism, a body, than the waste products of the cells in the interior of the group began to form a source of danger for the others. If some means of getting rid of these could not be devised, the group would destroy itself, and the experiment of co?peration, of colony-formation, of organization in fact, would be a failure.
Hence, at a very early period we find the development of the rudiments of systems of body-sewerage, providing for the escape of waste poisons through the food-tube, through the kidneys, through the gills and lungs, through the sweat glands of the skin. So that when the body is confronted by actual disease, it has all ready to its hand a remarkably effective and resourceful system of sanitary appliances--sewer-flushing, garbage-burning, filtration. In fact, this is precisely what it does when attacked by poisons from without: it neutralizes and eliminates them by the same methods which it has been practicing for millions of years against poisons from within.
Take, for instance, such a painfully familiar and unheroic episode as an attack of colic. It makes little difference whether the attack is due to the swallowing of some mineral poison, like lead or arsenic, or the irritating juice of some poisonous plant or herb, or to the every-day accident of including in the menu some article of diet which was beginning to spoil or decay, and which contained the bacteria of putrefaction or their poisonous products. The reaction of defense is practically the same, varying only with the violence and the character of the poison. If the dose of poisonous substances be unusually large or virulent, nature may short-circuit the whole attack by causing the outraged stomach to reject its contents. The power of "playing Jonah" is a wonderful safety-valve.
If the poison be not sufficiently irritating thus to short-circuit its own career, it may get on into the intestines before the body thoroughly wakes up to its presence. This part of the food-tube being naturally geared to discharge its contents downward, the simplest and easiest thing is to turn in a hurry call and cut down the normal schedule from hours to minutes, with the familiar result of an acute diarrh[oe]a.
Both vomiting and purging are defensive actions on nature's part, remedies instead of diseases. Yet we are continually regarding and treating them as if they were diseases in themselves. Nothing could be more irrational than to stop a diarrh[oe]a before it has accomplished its purpose. Intelligent physicians now assist it instead of trying to check it in its early stages; and paradoxical as it may sound, laxatives are often the best means of stopping it. It is only the excess of this form of nature's house-cleaning which needs to be checked. Many of the popular Colic Cures, Pain-Relievers, and "Summer Cordials" contain opium which, while it relieves the pain and stops the discharge, simply locks up in the system the very poisons which it was trying to get rid of. Laxatives, intestinal antiseptics, and bowel irrigations have almost taken the place of opiates in the treatment of these conditions in modern medicine. We try to help nature instead