Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/77

 it may appear to be with the prominent derangement. Diligent scrutiny will often detect a morbid condition where it was unsuspected; and a negative should never rest on surmise wherever direct evidence is attainable. Even where a regular consecutive train of morbid actions cannot be traced from the primary disturbance to the more remote consequence, morbid sympathies (a term which merely implies our ignorance of the intervening links in the chain of causation), will be found oftentimes to exist, which connect many painful affections with distant and often unheeded irritations. Enlightened scrutiny may frequently detect the latter when, from superficial examination, they had been overlooked. Darwin, in a case of convulsions, traced the source of irritation by which the nervous system was disturbed, to a ragged and inflamed wart, by the removal of which the disease was cured. The instances are of daily occurrence, in which remote excitements are caused or aggravated by the irritation derived from disordered bowels. If such diseases be treated with reference to the remote excitement only, in other words, to the ostensible nosological disease, a cure is hopeless, or, at best, tedious and uncertain, while, by removing the cause, they readily yield. And this suggests the absolute necessity of attending closely to the state of the bowels in all diseases, be the special malady what it may. Adequate stools, with healthy intestinal secretions, are necessary at all times. They become doubly so whenever the general health is disturbed, or disease of any kind has occurred. A large proportion of disease presents more or less of a febrile