Preventable Diseases | Page 5

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 than you have.
Don't imagine that calling in the doctor is going to interfere with the
natural course of the disease, or rob the patient of some chance he
might have had of recovering by himself. On the contrary, it will
simply give nature and the constitution of the patient a better chance in
the struggle, probably shorten it, and certainly make it less painful and
distressing.
If these symptoms of the summer fevers and fluxes are indicative of
nature's attempts to cure, those of the winter's coughs and colds are no
less clearly so. As we walk down the streets, we see staring at us in
large letters from a billboard, "Stop that Cough! It is Killing you!" Yet
few things could be more obvious to even the feeblest intelligence, than
that this "killing" cough is simply an attempt on the part of the body to
expel and get rid of irritating materials in the upper air-passages. As
long as your larynx and windpipe are inflamed or tickled by
disease-germs or other poisons, your body will do its best to get rid of
them by coughing, or, if they swarm on the mucous membrane of the
nose, by sneezing. To attempt to stop either coughing or sneezing
without removing the cause is as irrational as putting out a switch-light

without closing the switch. Though this, like other remedial processes,
may go to extremes and interfere with sleep, or upset the stomach,
within reasonable limits one of the best things to do when you have a
cold is to cough. When patients with severe inflammations of the lungs
become too weak or too deeply narcotized to cough, then attacks of
suffocation from the accumulation of mucus in the air-tubes are likely
to occur at any time. Young children who cannot cough properly, not
having got the mechanism properly organized as yet, have much greater
difficulty in keeping their bronchial tubes clear in bronchitis or
pneumonia than have grown-ups. Most colds are infectious, like the
fevers, and like them run their course, after which the cough will
subside along with the rest of the symptoms. But simply stopping the
cough won't hasten the recovery. Most popular "Cough-Cures" benumb
the upper throat and stop the tickling; smother the symptoms without
touching the cause. Many contain opium and thus load the system with
two poisons instead of one.
Lastly, in the realm of the nervous system, take that commonest of all
ills that afflict humanity--headache. Surely, this is not a curative
symptom or a blessing in disguise, or, if so, it is exceedingly well
disguised. And yet it unquestionably has a preventive purpose and
meaning. Pain, wherever found, is nature's abrupt command, "Halt!"
her imperative order to stop. When you have obeyed that command,
you have taken the most important single step towards the cure. A
headache always means something--overwork, under-ventilation,
eye-strain, underfeeding, infection. Some error is being committed,
some bad physical habit is being dropped into. There are a dozen
different remedies that will stop the pain, from opium and chloroform
down to the coal-tar remedies (phenacetin, acetanilid, etc.) and the
bromides. But not one of them "cures," in the sense of doing anything
toward removing the cause. In fact, on the contrary they make the
situation worse by enabling the sufferer to keep right on repeating the
bad habit, deprived of nature's warning of the harm that he is doing to
himself. As the penalties of this continued law-breaking pile up, he
requires larger and larger doses of the deadening drug, until finally he
collapses, poisoned either by his own fatigue-products or by the drugs
which he has been taking to deaden him against their effect.

In fine, follow nature's hints whenever she gives them: treat pain by
rest, infections by fresh air and cleanliness, the digestive disturbances
by avoiding their cause and helping the food-tube to flush itself clean;
keep the skin clean, the muscles hard, and the stomach well filled--and
you will avoid nine-tenths of the evils which threaten the race.
The essence of disease consists, not in either the kind or the degree of
the process concerned, but only in its relations to the general balance of
activities of the organism, to its "resulting in discomfort, inefficiency,
or danger," as one of our best-known definitions has it. Disease, then, is
not absolute, but purely relative; there is no single tissue-change, no
group even of changes