It is a lamentable fact that the medical profession, as a body, entertain a totally erroneous conception of the true nature of disease, and its legitimate function in the economy of nature. Instead of recognizing it as a beneficent remedial process, which, if properly aided, will work out the salvation of the patient, they antagonize it at every turn, and endeavor to suppress the symptoms, which are its legitimate expressions.
The whole thing is a huge misconception, the failure to understand the true relation between living and dead substances. According to the United States Dispensatory, medicines are those substances that make sanative impressions on the body.
A false definition of a word leads to a false system of remedial practice, based upon that definition. What is an impression? Is it the action of a dead substance, which cannot act upon a living substance that can? Assuredly not! Is it not rather the recognition by the living substance of the lifeless one? The whole theory of drug action is easily explainable on this hypothesis. Drugs—inert substances—do not act upon the living organism, but are acted upon, with a view to their expulsion from the living domain. If it were not so, if drugs really acted upon the various organs, then their action should be equally as effective after death as before. But no, nature resents the introduction of foreign substances into the human economy, and exerts all her powers to cast out the intruders.
Now, as all substances incapable of physiological use are foreign, such as particles of worn out tissue, the waste products of digestion, etc., and their presence in the animal economy inimical to the general welfare, the depurating organs are called into active play to expel the offending substances; and the increased physiological activity, and (in the case of actual lesion) the increased flow of blood to the parts, for the purpose of repair, cause a rise in temperature, commonly known as fever, which is one of the most frequent symptoms of what is generally recognized as disease; thus establishing the fact, indisputably, that disease is purely and simply a remedial process, either for purposes of repair or purification.
The practice, therefore, of increasing the deposits in the physical system by the introduction of drugs (foreign substances) is in direct opposition to physiological law, and has no scientific foundation whatever.
From the countless remedies of the pharmacopœia we can select substances that if administered to a healthy person will produce almost any known form of disease—thus: brandy, cayenne pepper and quinine, will induce inflammatory fever; scammony and ipecac will cause cholera morbus; nitre, calomel and opium, will provoke typhoid or typhus fever; digitalis will cause Asiatic, or spasmodic cholera; cod liver oil and sulphur promote scurvy, and all the cathartic family inevitably cause diarrhœa, the disease in each case being nothing more than the effort of Nature to get rid of these troublesome intruders.
Drugs do not, as their advocates claim, select their special organ with a view of acting upon it, but are acted upon by that particular organ for the purpose of ridding the system of the drug.
It follows, therefore, as a perfectly legitimate and logical deduction, that, if the system of administering drugs is founded upon a wrong conception of their relation to the human organism, then any theoretical “law of cure” predicated upon drug action must necessarily be equally fallacious and untrustworthy.