Preventable Diseases | Page 4

blindly fought all of these symptoms. We shut our patients up in stove-heated rooms with windows absolutely closed, for fear that they would "catch cold." We took off the sheets and piled blankets upon the bed, setting a special watch to see that the wretched sufferer did not kick them off. We discouraged the drinking of water and insisted on all drinks that were taken being hot or lukewarm. Nowadays all this is changed. We throw all the windows wide-open, and even put our patients out of doors to sleep in the open air, whether it be typhoid, tuberculosis, or pneumonia; knowing that not only they will not "catch cold," but that, as their hurried breathing indicates, they need all the oxygen they can possibly get, to burn up the poison poured out in the lungs and from the skin. We encourage the patient to drink all the cool, pure water he will take, sometimes gallons in a day, knowing that his thirst is an indication for flushing and flooding all the great systems of the body sewers. Instead of smothering him in blankets, we put him into cold packs, or put him to soak in cool water.
In short, we trust nature instead of defying her, co?perate with her in place of fighting her,--and we have cut down the death-rate of most fevers fifty to seventy-five per cent already. Plenty of pure, cool water internally, externally, and eternally, rest, fresh air, and careful feeding, are the best febrifuges and antipyretics known to modern medicine. All others are frauds and simply smother a symptom without relieving its cause, with the exception of quinine in malaria, mercury, and the various antitoxins in their appropriate diseases, which act directly upon the invading organism.
Underneath all this storm and stress of the fever paroxysm, nature is quietly at work elaborating her antidote. In some marvelous fashion, which we do not even yet fully understand, the cells of the body are producing in ever-increasing quantities an anti-body, or antitoxin, which will unite with the toxin or poison produced by the hostile germs and render it entirely harmless. By a curious paradox of the process, it does not kill the germs themselves. It may not even stop their further multiplication. Indeed, it utilizes part of their products in the formation of the antitoxin; but it domesticates them, as it were--turns them from dangerous enemies into harmless guests.
The treaty between these germs and the body, however, is only of the "most-favored-nation" class; for let these tamed and harmless friends of the family escape and enter the body of another human being, and they will attack it as virulently as ever.
Now, where and how did nature ever succeed in getting the rehearsal and the practice necessary to build up such an extraordinary and complicated system of defense as this? Take your microscope and look at a drop of fluid from the mouth, the gums, the throat, the stomach, the bowels, and you will find it simply swarming with bacteria, bacilli, and cocci, each species of which numbers its billions. There are thirty-three species which inhabit the mouth and gums alone! We are literally alive with them; but most of them are absolutely harmless, and some of them probably slightly helpful in the processes of digestion. In fevers and infections the body merely applies to disease-germs the tricks which it has learned in domesticating these millions of harmless vegetable inhabitants.
Still more curious--there is a distinct parallel between the method in which food-materials are split up and prepared for assimilation by the body, and the method adopted in breaking up and neutralizing the toxins of disease-germs. It is now known that poisons are formed in the process of digesting and absorbing the simplest and most wholesome foods; and the liver uses the skill which it has gained in dealing with these "natural poisons" in disposing of the toxins of germs.
When a fever has run its course, as we now know nearly all infections do, within periods ranging from three or four days to as many weeks, it simply means that it has taken the liver and the other police-cells this length of time to handle the rioters and turn them into peaceable and law-abiding, even though not well-disposed citizens. In this process the forces of law and order can be materially helped by skillful and intelligent co?peration. But it takes brains to do it and avoid doing more harm than good. It requires far more intelligence on the part of the doctor, the nurse, or the mother, skillfully to help nature than it did blindly to fight her.
This is what doctors and nurses are trained for nowadays, and they are of use in the sick-room simply because they have devoted more time and money to the study of these complicated processes