Preventable Diseases | Page 2

obstacles in its way.
This remedial power does not imply any gift of prophecy on nature's
part, nor is it proof of design, or beneficent intention. It is rather one of
those blind reactions to certain stimuli, tending to restore the balance of
the organism, much as that interesting, new scientific 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 coöperation, 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"