Preventable Diseases | Page 3

of thwarting her.
Supposing that the poison be of more insidious form, a germ or a ptomaine, for instance, which slips past these outer "firing-out" defenses of the food-tube and arouses no suspicion of its presence until it has been partially digested and absorbed into the blood. Again, resourceful nature is ready with another line of defense. It was for a long time a puzzle why every drop of the blood containing food and its products absorbed from the alimentary food-canal had to be carried, often by a most roundabout course, to and through the liver, before it could reach any part of the general system. Here was the largest and most striking organ in the body, and it was as puzzling as it was large. We knew in some crude way that it "made blood," that it prepared the food-products for use by the body-cells, and that it secreted the bile; but this latter secretion had little real digestive value, and the other changes seemed hardly important enough to demand that every drop of the blood coming from the food-tube should pass through this custom-house. Now, however, we know that in addition to its other actions, the liver is a great poison-sponge or toxin-filter, for straining out of the blood poisonous or injurious materials absorbed from the food, and converting them into harmless substances. It is astonishing what a quantity of these poisons, whether from the food or from germs swallowed with it, the liver is capable of dealing with--destroying them, converting them, and acting as an absolute barrier to their passage into the general system. But sometimes it is overwhelmed by appalling odds; some of the invaders slip through its lines into the general circulation, producing headache, backache, fever, and a "dark-brown taste in the mouth"; and, behold, we are bilious, and proceed to blame the poor liver. We used to pour in remedies to "stir it up," to "work on it"--which was about as rational as whipping a horse when he is down, instead of cutting his harness or taking his load off. Nowadays we stop the supply of further food-poisons by stopping eating, assist nature in sweeping out or neutralizing the enemies that are still in the alimentary canal, flush the body with pure water, put it at rest--and trust the liver. Biliousness is a sign of an overworked liver. If it wasn't working at all, we shouldn't be bilious: we should be dead, or in a state of collapse.
Moral: Don't rush for some remedy with which to club into insensibility every symptom of disease as soon as it puts in an appearance. Give nature a little chance to show what she intends to do before attempting to stop her by dosing yourself with some pain-reliever or colic cure. Don't trust her too blindly, for the best of things may become bad in extremes, and the body may become so panic-stricken as to keep on throwing overboard, not merely the poisons, but its necessary daily food, if the process be allowed to continue too long.
This is where the doctor comes in. This is the point at which it takes brains to succeed in the treatment of disease--to decide just how far nature knows what she is doing, even in her most violent expulsive methods, and is to be helped; and just when she has lost her head, or got into a bad habit, and must be thwarted. This much we feel sure of, and it is one of the keynotes of the attitude of modern medicine, that a large majority of the symptoms of disease are really nature's attempts to cure it.
This is admirably shown in our modern treatment of fevers. These we now know to be due to the infection of the body by more or less definitely recognized disease-germs or organisms. Fever is a complicated process, and we are still in the dark upon many points in regard to it, but we are coming more and more firmly to the conclusion that most of its symptoms are a part of, or at least incidents in, the fight of the body against the invading army. The flushed and reddened skin is due to the pumping of large quantities of blood through its mesh, in order that the poisons may be got rid of through the perspiration. The rapid pulse shows the vigor with which the heart is driving the blood around the body, to have its poisons neutralized in the liver, burned up in the lungs, poured out by the kidneys and the skin. The quickened breathing is the putting on of more blast in the lung poison-crematory. It is possible that even the rise of temperature has an injurious effect upon the invading germs or assists the body in their destruction.
In the past we have