Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/68

62 certain plants often gave comfort and apparently often helped the sick man to recover. So arose the more materialistic cure of disease and the profession of physicians.

By those who studied disease from the more material standpoint many theories were devised to explain the phenomena displayed by the sick. The lack of knowledge of the minute or even the gross structure of the body and its working in health, necessarily made all these attempts at explanation more or less crude and imperfect. Every conceivable "cure" was tried from age to age, and, no matter what the means employed, whether gold or clay, sassafras or tar water, whether the patient was bled or whether sharp hooks were applied to his flesh in order to "draw out the humors," always a certain percentage of patients recovered from the disease and survived the treatment. For the time, at least, the "cure" was apparently justified by the results, and held its place in practise until a change of theories or an unusually long list of failures threw it into disrepute, and it was relegated to the list of things which "have been used but are now found of little value."

The more obvious causes of disease—intemperance, exposure to heat and cold, exhaustion, etc.—were early connected with certain forms of bodily ailments, and even diseases like malaria were known to depend somewhat on local conditions of living, but it is only within recent years that such common affections as pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, etc., have been found to have a tangible cause working within the body. With the discovery of bacteria and their poisons there still remained the questions, What is disease? Why, even in times of plague, are some persons exempt? and why do certain persons recover and others succumb even with the same treatment?

We can no longer look upon sickness as due to the presence within or without us of an evil-natured personality. We must reverse the idea and say that disease is the manifestation of a good consciousness within us, a consciousness which seeks to maintain life by endeavoring to rid the body of a harmful material presence. We realize through abnormal sensations that we are sick—that the body has undergone a change from the condition of health, but within us is a more elemental intelligence of which we are not aware, an older body-mind which, whether we sleep or wake, and even before we are born into consciousness of self, looks after the highly complex and interdependent structures on which life depends, constantly directing its complicated affairs with unerring faithfulness. Disease may be said to be the effort made by the body, directed by this deeper mind, in its attempt to rid itself in most appropriate ways of whatsoever it finds harmful to it, or that threatens its destruction. A fit of vomiting, in which the conscious mind takes a passive and even unwilling part, is but the wise attempt on the part of this inner consciousness to rid the body of that which it finds to be harmful. In the