Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/534

520 in other ("symptomatic") diseases, is often aggravated by the suppression of its external manifestations. In other words, Art is here competent to deal with the hostile "power behind phenomena," and Instinct resigns its mission to Reason.

It is still a mooted question if tuberculosis can be included among the "germ-diseases" of this class; but attention has been called to the circumstance that a certain stage of pulmonary consumption stimulates the sexual instinct to a degree which can hardly be supposed to benefit the exhausted state of the organism. The study of that indubitable fact offers a curious problem, but also a solution which considerably modifies the apparent paradox. The truth seems to be, that the tendency alluded to manifests itself only in a far advanced and practically hopeless stage of the disease, when Nature sacrifices the interests of the individual to those of the species. Moths, impaled in the collector's show-case, often pay an interest on the debt of Nature by a deposit of numerous eggs. Many plants ripen their fruit just before the end of the season. At the brink of Styx doomed men are apt to renounce individual cares and become eloquent for the benefit of posterity. It is Nature's law of reversion. It is also true that far-gone consumptives are very apt to indulge in exuberant hopes, belied by an event which they can hardly have helped to postpone.

But it is equally certain that, in a far larger number of diseases, instinct is the safest guide to recovery. The overloaded stomach rejects food; the exhausted system at last accepts no compensation but sleep. Wounded animals crouch motionless in their hiding-places; instinct informs them that rest increases the chances of recovery. The unrest of asthma-patients intimates the surest remedy—change of air and outdoor exercise. Fever-patients pant for refrigeration. Dyspepsia can be avoided by heeding the premonitory symptoms—the want of appetite that accompanies the first stage of chronic indigestion. In the incipient stages of scurvy, and many enteric disorders, the organism demands a change of diet as urgently as the perspiring skin clamors for a change of temperature. But when has that instinct ever clamored for drugs? If suppuration fails to dislodge a thorn, the skin of the inflamed parts becomes tenuous, and at last prurient, and not only tolerates but invites excision. We see, then, that instinct can adapt itself to abnormal circumstances, and the question recurs: In what state of distress does our stomach cease to protest against the compounds of the drug-monger? Or, shall we believe that our protective instincts, at the most critical moments, become false to their mission, and urgently warn us against the means of salvation? Yet, against ninety-nine of a hundred remedial drugs they protest with a persistence which can be overcome only by such juggles as lozenges and sugar-coated pills. That protest is a cliff which will ultimately wreck all the arguments of the castor-oil school. Home-sickness, if curable only by a counter-poison, inspires its victims to seek relief in friendship