Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-09-10
THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE.

" Prevention is better than cure, and
far cheaper" said John Locke, two hum
bred years ago and the history of medical
science has made it more and more prob
able that, in stricter sense of the word,
prevention is the only possible cure. By
observing the health laws of Nature, a
sound constitution can be very easily pre-
served, but. if violation of those laws has
brought on disease, all we can do by way
of curing" that disease is to remove the
cause in other words, to prevent the con-
tinued operation Of the predisposing cir
cumstances.
Suppressing the symptoms in any other
way means only to change the form of the
disease, or to postpone its crisis. Thus,
mercurial salyes will cleanse the skin by
driving the ulcers from the surface to the
interior of the body opiates stop fux
only by paralyzing the bowels. e., turn
ing their morbid activity into morbid in
activity the symptoms of pneumonia can
be suppressed by bleeding the patient till
the exhausted system has to postpone the
crisis of the disease. This process, the
" breaking up of sickness" in the Ian
guage of the old school allopathists, is
therefore in reality only an interrupting of
it, temporary interruption of the symp-
toms. We might as well try to cure the
sleepiness of weary child by pinching its
eyelids, or the hunger of whining dog
by COMPRISING his throat.
Drugs are not wholly useless. If my
life depended upon job of work that had
to be finished before morning, and the in.
clination to fall asleep was getting irresisti-
BILE, l should not hesitate to defy Nature,
and keep myself awake with cup after
cupful of strong black coffee. If 1 were
afflicted with sore. spreading rapidly
from my temple toward my nose, | should
suppress it by the shortest process, even by
deliberately producing a larger sore else
where, rather than let the smaller one de-
stroy my eyesight. There are also two or
three forms of disease which have thus
far) resisted all unmedicinal cures, and
can hardly be trusted to the heal
ing powers of Nature = the tues
venerea, scabies, and prurigo-because, as
Claude Bernard suggests, their symptoms
are probably due to the agency OF micro
scopic parasites, which oppose to the action
of the vital forces a life energy of their
own, or, as DR.. Jennings prts it, "because
art has here to interfere-not for the pur-
pose of breaking up diseased action, but
for the removal Of the cause of that action,
the destruction of an active virus that pos
sesses the power of self-perpetuation be-
You'd the dislodgng ability of Nature
But with those rare exceptions it is bet
ter to direct our efforts against the cause
rather than the symptoms i. e., in about
ninety-nine cases out Of a hundred it is not
only the safer but also the shorter way to
avoid drugs, reform our habits, and, for
the resi- let Nature have her course; for,
properly speaking, disease itself is a re-
constructive process, an expulsive effort,
whose interruption compels nature to do
double work to resume her operations
against the ailment after expelling worse
enemy-the drug If drugged patient
RECEIVERS, the true explanation is that his
constitution was strong enough to over
come both the disease and the druggist
DIR. Felix L. Oswald, in Popular Science
Monthly