Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/760

740 diseases nor formulas for prescriptions. It is differentiation as opposed to classification or generalization. The effect, expression, or impression of disease, is not mistaken for disease as a cause. Subject one hundred persons of both sexes and various ages to a cold rain and then to a burning sun, and you will have as many different states as persons. The disturbance of the vital force has found expression in a hundred different forms. It is in the province of the homoeopathic physician to locate the center of disturbance, and then to select as the remedy, by a process of elision from the many similars in the materia medica, the one which most nearly coincides with the expression of the disease or symptoms. When this process sometimes involves the most experienced and skillful physician in a profound study of one, two, and three hours and of re-examination as the expression changes, requiring due weight to be given to each symptom, both relatively and positively, and then to assume the grave responsibility of administering a single remedy and awaiting the result, it will be readily seen that those who are faithful to the law, and able to administer it, will be few.

By operation of the will a strong man liberates from a nerve-center of his brain nerve-energy which, acting along the motor nerves, liberates in its turn sufficient muscular energy to fell an ox. Here the immaterial, the will, has produced a most powerful material result. Suppose for a moment that the nerve-energy had been misdirected, as in case of shock from mental causes, and had all been expended within the man, who would answer for the result?

In the heroic struggle which Nature, unaided, makes against disease, the assistance from Art necessary to speed the cure may in a great majority of cases be set down in decimals, as follows:

and it will be pretty safe to say that, whenever the proportion is against Nature, there will be no cure.

It is the which Art is called upon to throw into the scales and make them equal. If she adds more, she destroys the balance.

The atomic dose is adjusted to restore the balance. It is the infinitesimal fraction Nature needs to make the unit health.

If you accept the germ-theory of disease, and attribute to the atomic germs, floating impalpable in the air, or carried long distances through the mails on highly calendered writing-paper, from mere contact with the hands of diseased persons, the power of communicating disease and completely overwhelming the vital power, causing death, you can not logically deny to the atomic dose all aid to the vital power in resisting and defeating the attack of the atomic germ of disease simply because the dose is atomic. Nature, unaided, in a vast number of cases, successfully resists those diseases which are