One gives drugs for sleeplessness rightly when there is some rare and special reason for being awake, some catastrophic reason which will never occur again. This exemplifies the principle which I have tried to emphasize throughout this book. We may give money for some catastrophic cause which puts the person down and out, and will not occur again. So we give a drug for sleeplessness if there has been some special thing to interfere with sleep--if, for instance, you have been talking very hard with a friend and you know by your own feelings that your mind will not stop that night. Then you may perfectly properly take a drug to put you to sleep, knowing that there is no reason to suppose that such a talk will occur again in the near future. Knowing this, you do not need to waste that night. You take the drug. But it is only in rare catastrophic moments that one can be cured in spite of one's self, any more than one can give or take money safely. It is the same in the matter of constipation. The first thing to make clear to a patient is that drugs must be abandoned before he can ever teach his bowels to behave as they should. But it is a great deal of trouble to do that, and because people shirk that trouble, and want to be "cured in spite of themselves," they come to a doctor to be cured by drugs. Alas, he is often weak enough to give them what they seek! I have tried to make this drug-fearing practice one of the policies that honest medicine must always stand for, because it seems to me that when the doctor allows himself to be tempted into behaving as a considerable number of his profession do--that is, into giving people what they ask for--he very soon loses his ideals, gives things that he knows more and more clearly that he has no right to give, and goes downhill. Social assistants must help the doctor to avoid this disaster. They can do so by helping him to teach the truth. I want to deal a little further with some examples of what nature does in the way of warding off disease. For a large part of what we call disease, and what we feel in ourselves as disease, is not the attack of the enemy, but is our defence against the enemy.