Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/89

Rh under its application, have had a direct effect on the progress of the inflammation. Although it may appear to be so, it is no way demonstrated. It is the same also with chronic inflammatory processes. The subsidence of single favorably localized forms may perhaps be promoted by such measures as massage, gymnastics, electricity, special baths, etc.; but of them all it can only be said that they promote absorption; but no immediate influence on the organism, no cure of the processes, is worked by them. It may be all the same to the patient whether massage controls the restorative process directly or indirectly, so that it makes him well. In many other instances the application of similar methods in favorable cases may overcome individual symptoms, and remove the products of the disease, without yet having any essential influence upon its progress. The various diseases of the blood, metabolic derangements, and the inexhaustible multitude of disorders of the nervous system, to this time have furnished no more opportunities for a real cure than the soil of Alaska for the successful cultivation of the date palm. Among infectious diseases we admit only that in typhus, scarlet fever, measles, dysentery, cholera, and the long, dangerous host of such contracting diseases, medical art can contribute much to a favorable outcome by counteracting dangerous symptoms, and through general hygienic measures and a judicious direction of nourishment. But in only two, perhaps three, of these diseases can medicine induce a cure by direct influence upon the pathological processes viz., on malaria, syphilis, and acuta rheumatism. Of the last, we only know that the salicylic treatment allays the fever and the joint affection, but is without influence on the dangerous endocarditis, with its following of disordered heartrhythm. And all other infections, when they have become outbroken and developed illness, can not to this day be cured in the sense in which science uses that word. Whichever way one turns he will everywhere strike limits. In fact, a diseased condition is susceptible of cure only so long as it is attacked while still advancing; as soon as it has reached a definite culmination, no more; there then remain deformations, atrophies, hypertrophies, and other resultants of most various kinds. In most cases these are out of the reach of therapeutic influence and restorative process, except occasionally through a mechanical measure or the knife of the surgeon. An acute pleurisy is curable, but not its residues. The metabolic anomalies which lead to the formation of calculus in the kidneys can be influenced in the beginning, but the stone when it is formed can be removed only by the surgeon. The possibility of therapeutic effect is in many cases determined by the locality of the process, and, further, by the circumstance whether the cause of disease accrued suddenly or