Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/88

78 healing art? It is indeed humanly proper to hope for a still wider extension of its scope, and it is a duty to try to obtain it. But it is becoming to the scientific man to look without prepossessions only at the facts, and with calm consideration to take account, not of what has been obtained only, but of what is attainable.

"Being ill is life under changed conditions." What, then, is it to heal? To influence pathological processes in the organism in such a way that they shall be brought to a halt, that the deranged tissues and disturbed functions shall be restored to the normal, and the interrupted interchanges between individual tissues and functions and the whole system shall be brought back to healthful relations; that is what we call healing.

Healing, in the sense that the physician's art can control organic processes in full activity, has not been advanced by the practical progress that has been made through antisepsis. For a tumor or an abscess can no more be made to go backward at this time than formerly. The exsection and opening of them are not synonymous with a real cure. And as with superficial lesions and those arising from external causes, so it is with those in the interior organism, out of whatever causes they may have originated. In an ulceration of the bowels, a cure may be speeded by a series of appropriate measures to the extent that further injuries may be prevented, but the restoration of the injured parts will not be accomplished by them. On the bursting of a blood-vessel and the lesion of the brain-substance, it is necessary to apply suitable preventives to limit the congestion of the brain; but no measure of the surgeon hastens the coagulation of the blood or the adhesion of the divided nerve-substance.

Inflammations constitute another class of clinical affections, either acute or chronic, which, appearing in different organs, are grouped under that single designation. As we know from daily experience, the acute forms of inflammation are often cured, the chronic more rarely. There is, however, no internal medicament of demonstrated direct application for acute inflammations. Such remedies can only act indirectly in special cases as, for instance, most means in acute catarrhs as supporting applications.

The therapeutic potentiality of the physician's art is its most ancient possession, grossly overapplied through centuries, then abruptly abandoned in part, and now wavering in uncertainty. Quiet, cold, and local bloodletting are the basis of a treatment which is, under well-defined conditions, very helpful in acute inflammations. But it is sometimes fruitless, sometimes inapplicable. Deep inflammations, skin eruptions, and processes that set in with great activity, are regarded quite apart from specific forms like tuberculosis; and still it is far from being proved that the therapeutic treatment, even when the symptoms have