The Natural Cure of Consumption, Constipation, Bright's Disease, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, "Colds" (Fevers), Etc.: How Sickness Originates, and How to Prevent It. A Health Manual for the People.Page, C. E. (Charles Edward)
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The Natural Cure of Consumption, Constipation, Bright's Disease, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, "Colds" (Fevers), Etc.: How Sickness Originates, and How to Prevent It. A Health Manual for the People.
Page, C. E. (Charles Edward)
Hygiene -- Popular works; Medicine, Popular
Dr. Bright immortalized his name by discovering the fact that, when a
man’s last sickness is attended with a certain class of symptoms, as
albumen in the urine, final suppression of the urine, and uremic
poisoning, they are occasioned by a peculiar disease or degeneration of
the kidney. From a practical stand-point we care nothing about the kind of
change taking place in the kidney, but rather ask what kind of change in
our habits will keep this, and all the organs of the body, in a healthy
condition? The former study is all well enough for those who desire it,
but if _too much time_ is devoted to it, and to the _relation of drugs
thereto_, by an individual, he may be, probably will be, the very least
fitted to advise an inquirer who desires to know what he can do to be
saved from disease and the supposed necessity of taking medicine. Says Dr.
Dickinson (ibid., chap. VI.): “There are few disorders which are more
under the influence of medicine than is the catarrhal inflammation of the
kidneys.” And the very next sentence is one worth pondering on by those
who are accustomed to take medicine whenever they come to grief through
ignorance or neglect of the laws of life: “Under some plans of treatment,”
says this celebrated authority, in continuing, “plans which formerly were
almost universally adopted, and _still have their advocates_, the disorder
is one of heavy mortality. Under other circumstances the danger is so
small, that if once the complaint be recognized, a recovery may be
reckoned upon in a large _proportion_ of cases. Without treatment of any
kind there is reason to suppose that a large _majority_ of the subjects of
it would recover.” (The italics are my own.) From this it will be observed
that it depends on one’s luck whether he shall fall into the hands of a
practitioner who belongs to a class still adhering to the plan ensuring a
“heavy mortality,” or of one whose modified form of treatment is less
fatal; and upon his good sense, whether he shall come under the influence
of either, or adopt the methods indicated herein, viz., the abandonment of
disease-producing, and the adoption of _ease_-producing, habits, which
would be an immense gain over the “no treatment” plan which, according to
a rational interpretation of Dr. Dickinson’s language, is the safest of
the three referred to by him. From the three-hundred-page treatise before
me, which is fresh from the mint (1881), and is a most valuable book for
those who wish to study the pathology of the disease (Bright’s), but which
is little calculated to aid any one healthward, except he be already
pretty well informed in hygienic matters, I cull, in addition to the
paragraphs already quoted, the following little nugget of pure gold: “We
must avoid the use of any drugs which, under the name of stimulating
diuretics, might exasperate the existing congestion; and we must enforce
such diet as to reduce to a minimum that nitrogenous excess which finds
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