II. There are cases where the efforts of nature are too feeble to do service, as in malignant and chronic fevers.
III. There are cases where the efforts of nature are over proportioned to the strength of the disease, as in the cholera morbus and dysentery.
IV. There are cases where nature is idle, as in the atonic stages of the gout, the cancer, the epilepsy, the mania, the venereal disease, the apoplexy, and the tetanus[13].
V. There are cases in which nature does mischief. She wastes herself with an unnecessary fever, in a dropsy and consumption. She throws a plethora upon the brain and lungs in the apoplexy and peripneumonia notha. She ends a pleurisy and peripneumony in a vomica, or empyema. She creates an unnatural appetite for food in the hypochondriac disease. And, lastly, she drives the melancholy patient to solitude, where, by brooding over the subject of his insanity, he increases his disease.
We are accustomed to hear of the salutary kindness of nature in alarming us with pain, to prompt us to seek for a remedy. But,
VI. There are cases in which she refuses to send this harbinger of the evils which threaten her, as in the aneurism, schirrhous, and stone in the bladder.
VII. There are cases where the pain is not proportioned to the danger, as in the tetanus, consumption, and dropsy of the head. And,
VIII. There are cases where the pain is over-proportioned to the danger, as in the paronychia and tooth-ach.
This is a short account of the operations of nature, in the diseases of civilized nations. A lunatic might as well plead against the sequestration of his estate, because he once enjoyed the full exercise of his reason, or because he still had lucid intervals, as nature be exempted from the charges we have brought against her.