Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal (Volume 5) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And her order with reference to man is an order of health, not an order of disease. Diseasedjbodily conditions grow out of and are but another name for departures from natural bodily conditions. These departures may have been made centuries before their victim is born, but as soon as discovered nature sets herself to amend and correct. Modern medicine gives no color to the superstition which would hide a disease in every cleft and crevice of the earth, lying in ambush waiting for a victim. Such a conception may serve a good purpose in poetry, or for the eloquent periods of the orator, but it does not answer to hard facts. Modern medicine gives no encouragement to that class of weeping philosophers, medical and otherwise, who mourn over a long list of unavoidable diseases?" the ills which flesh is heir to." It does not tolerate that conception of diseases which leaves them outside the pale of law, as if they were the caprices of some demon, or the results of blind chance. In the better conception of one of your profession, " The strength of modern therapeutics lies in the clearer perception than formerly of the great truth that diseases are but perverted life processes, and have their natural history, not only a beginning, but a period of culmination and decline. In common inflammatory affections this is now admitted to be almost universal law. By time and rest that innate vis medicatrix, "Which hath an operation more divine Than breath or pen can give expression to," reduces the perversions back again to the physiological limits and health is restored. To this beneficent law we owe the maintenance of the form and beauty of our race in the presence of so much that tends to spoil and degrade it. We cannot pass through the crowded streets and alleys of our cities without re...