SECTION X.
The Author’s Practice.
There are some diseases of which it is difficult to discover exactly the cause, and consequently it must be so to determine the indication, and to regulate the method of cure; and yet such diseases are easily cured when those points are once ascertained. It is not so of the Tabes dorsalis. That disease is known, its cause is known: (it is, as M. Lewis observes, a particular sort of consumption, of which the proximate cause is a general debility of the nerves:) the indication is easily formed, and there can be no great differing in opinions about the essential method of cure: and yet even the best methods often fail; this is a reason the more for fixing the particulars with exactness.
A general relaxation of the fibres, a weakness of the nervous system, a depravation of the fluids, are the causes of this evil. It depends on the weakening of all the parts; the great requisite is to restore strength to them; this is the sole indication, which has again its respective subdivisions, derived from the different parts that are weakened; but as the same remedies are of service in them all, it is needless to particularise those subdivisions here, which has been already done in the course of this work.
Those who are totally ignorant of physic, and who nevertheless talk more of it than those who understand it, will probably think it very easy to accomplish this indication; and that with good aliments, and the cordials with which pharmacy abounds, it is a matter of great facility to restore strength; while, on the contrary, sad experiences have taught our greatest physicians that nothing could be more difficult.
“It is easy (says M. Gorter) to diminish the vital forces, but we have hardly any thing capable to repair them[103].” This may easily be conceived, on reflecting, that aliments and remedies are nothing but the instruments of which Nature makes use to support itself, to repair her losses, and to remedy the disorders which happen to the body. And what is Nature? The aggregate of the forces of the body harmoniously distributed. It is the vital force respectively distributed into the different parts. When those forces are exhausted, Nature it is that consequently fails; she is the working architect that no longer executes her functions; furnish her with materials, as long as you please, she is in no condition to employ them. You may bury an architect, with all his building, under stone, wood, and mortar, without an inch of a wall being thereby repaired. Just so it is with diseases dependent on the destruction of the vital forces: the aliments repair nothing, the remedies operate nothing. I have seen stomachs so weakened, that aliments received from it no more preparation than in a vessel of wood: sometimes they take place in it according to the laws of their specific gravities, and when, at length, a new ingestion has, by its weight, irritated the stomach, they have been known, on a slight effort, to come away, successively, clearly separate one from another. At other times, through a long stay in the stomach, they corrupt in it, and are vomited up just as if they had been suffered to putrify in a vessel of silver or porcelain. What good can be hoped from aliments of this sort? The exhaustion of strength is not, indeed, so considerable in all: there are some in whom the vital forces are only weakened without being totally destroyed; for these there remains some resource in aliments, and even in remedies. What remains unperished of Nature draws some benefit from aliments: as to the remedies, they are to be sought for among those which have been observed to be fittest for re-animating that principle of the vital action which is verging to extinction: these are the adventitious aids, with which the architect is to be enabled to work at his task at the least expence possible of the strength that is left him: sometimes, too, they serve, as a spur to a weak horse, that may oblige him to make an effort to get out of a plunge in a slough; but what expertness, what prudence are not required, to be able at one cast of the eye, to judge comparatively the depth of the slough, and the strength of the animal? If the attempt is beyond his strength, that spur will, it is true, oblige him to make an effort; but if that effort is not sufficient to disengage him, and bring him into the good road again, it will only serve to totally exhaust him.
The weakness which is produced by self-pollution, is attended with such a difficulty in the choice of restorative remedies, as does not occur in other cases; which is, that those articles must, with the greatest care, be avoided, that, bringing with them any irritation, might awaken the sensual passion. In the animal mechanism, that mechanism so different from the inanimate, and so little subjected to the same rules, there is a law, that, when the motions augment, the augmentation is the most considerable in the parts the most susceptible. In self-polluters those parts are the generative ones. It is in these parts that the effect of the irritating remedies will the most sensibly manifest itself; and the dangerous consequences of this effect cannot be too circumstantially guarded against in the choice of the means of cure. What then are they to be? This is what I shall examine, after having particularised the regimen. In this particularisation, I shall follow the common division of the six non-naturals, as they are termed, Air, Aliments, Rest, Motion, the natural Evacuations, and the Passions.
AIR.
Air has the influence over us, that water has over fish, and even a much more considerable one. Those who know how great a power the air has, and who also know that there have been Epicures who could, by the taste, discover not only the river, but even the part of the river out of which the fish had been taken;
——lupus hic Tiberinus an alto
Captus hiet, pontesne inter jactatus an amnis