We can now understand how the processes just described produce the well-known cardinal symptoms of inflammation and fever; the redness, heat and swelling due to increased blood pressure, congestion and the accumulation of exudates; the pain due to irritation and to pressure on the nerves. We can also realize how impaired nutrition and the obstruction and destruction in the affected parts and organs will interfere with and inhibit functional activity. The organism has still other ways and means of defending itself. At the time of bacterial infection, certain germ-killing substances are developed in the blood serum. Science has named these defensive proteins ~alexins.~ It has also been found that the phagocyte and tissue cells in the neighborhood of the area of irritation produce antipoisons or natural antitoxins, which neutralize the bacterial poisons and kill the microorganisms of disease. With the Evil, Nature Provides the Cure Furthermore, the growth and development of bacteria and parasites is inhibited and finally arrested by their own waste products. We have an example of this in the yeast germ, which thrives and multiplies in the presence of sugar in solution. Living on and digesting the sugar, it decomposes the sugar molecules into alcohol and carbonic acid. As the alcohol increases during the process of fermentation, it gradually arrests the development and activity of the yeast cells. Similar phenomena accompany the activity of disease germs and parasites. They produce certain waste products which gradually inhibit their own growth and increase. The vaccines, serums and antitoxins of medical science are prepared from these bacterial excrements and from extracts made of the bodies of bacteria. In the serum and antitoxin treatment, therefore, the allopathic school is imitating Nature's procedure in checking the growth of microorganisms, but with this difference: Nature does not suppress the growth and multiplication of disease germs until the morbid matter on which they subsist has been decomposed and consumed, and until the inflammatory processes have run their course through the five stages of inflammation; while serums and antitoxins given in powerful doses at the different stages of any disease may check and suppress germ activity and the processes of inflammation before the latter have run their natural course and before the morbid matter has been eliminated. The Five Stages of Inflammation What has been said in former chapters confirms my claim that all acute diseases are uniform in their causes and in their purpose. From the foregoing description of inflammation it will have become clear that they are also uniform in their pathological development. The uniformity of acute inflammatory processes becomes still more apparent when we follow them through their five succeeding stages, that is: Incubation, Aggravation, Destruction, Abatement and Reconstruction, as illustrated in the following diagram: