“It would be folly, however, to avoid a treatment because it will not for ever root up your disease in your own convenient time. Look at the destructive manner in which colchicum reduces a gouty fit, how it approximates the attacks, and utterly disorganizes the viscera; and then regard what the water cure is capable of doing, both against individual attacks, and in reduction of the diathesis, the vital parts meanwhile improving under its operation; ... if it does not utterly cure the gout, at least it does not shorten the patient’s life as colchicum does.” On the effects of colchicum he, further on, observes:— “To the patient, and, indeed, to the physician who knows little of physiology, all this will appear right: the gout is removed, and that is what was desired. The physician, however, who is a physiologist, will say, ‘True, that irritation which you call gout, has left the extremities, whither it had been sent by nature to save her noble internal parts. But look to the signs exhibited by those parts; are they not those of augmented irritation, at least of irritation of a degree and kind that did not exist so long as the limbs were pained and inflamed? The fact is, that your colchicum has set up in the viscera so intense an irritation as to reconcentrate the mischief within; and the fit is cured, not by ridding the body of the gouty irritation, but by driving or drawing it in again,’ (thus baffling nature’s efforts at self relief). ‘Hence the continuance of the dyspeptic symptoms after the fit; hence, as you will find, the recurrence of another fit ere long, the intervals becoming less and less, until gouty pain is incessantly in the limbs, and gouty irritation always in the viscera.’” When the drugging practitioner drives the inflammation from the extremities to a more dangerous internal position, he congratulates himself on having cured the gout; but what in reality has he done?—By his mischievous interference with nature, he has endangered his patient’s life and shaken his constitution; whilst the gouty irritation, which causes the complaint, remains unsubdued, ready to be transferred at a moment to the head or heart, the practitioner having cleverly banished it from its original harmless position. It is in this way also that the Allopathist cures skin diseases, driving in the irritation which nature is struggling to drive out; this he eventually succeeds in doing, by weakening the powers of the system, and then fancies the disease is cured, whilst the patient pays in the long run for these hostile operations against nature. But we have interrupted Sir Bulwer Lytton,—he thus proceeds:—