A friendly letter of counsel and advice to consumptives and other invalids : also, prescriptions, with special directions for the cure of chills and fever / by S.S. Fitch.

  • Fitch, Samuel Sheldon, 1801-1876.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A friendly letter of counsel and advice to consumptives and other invalids : also, prescriptions, with special directions for the cure of chills and fever / by S.S. Fitch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    6/64
    removed directly through the lungs. Large, sound lungs, and a constant supply of pure air, are therefore absolutely indispensable to the complete removal of the detritus, or worn-out matter of the body. DISEASE AND ITS CAUSES. From the views above given of what life and health depend upon, we are pre- pared to understand what disease is, and in what it originates. Disease, whatever its forms or variety, results from some of the following causes: 1. From external violence, including all injuries from blows, cuts, falls, licit. frost, breaking of bones, too violent exercise, &c. 2. From taking into the system, poisons and other hurtful agents ; embracing all poisons, as well as improper food and other injurious substances, put into the stomach; all poisons received directly into the blood by contact or inooulation, and all inhaled into the lun^s in the air. From these sources come our contagious diseases, and fevers, and most acute diseases. 3. From defective nutrition—whether imperfection in food, digestion, the vitalizing process in the lungs, or any other circumstance. 4. Defective excrementilion, or a failure to completely and constantly rid the system of waste matter, whether this waste matter is that which has once formed a part of the living organization, and has worn out, or that which has never been vitalized in the process of nutrition. I should add, that some diseases may be inherited; that is, when the system of the parent has become corrupted or diseased from any of the above causes, he may transmit the disease or corrupt blood to his or her offspring. The 3d and 4th causes mentioned are the great sources of chronic disease. The others may, indeed, lay the foundation of chronic disease, but they do it by interrupting or deranging nutrition and excrementition. Wherever retained waste matter settles, there it causes mischief. It may be in the brain, and their we have disease there—water on the brain, or something else ; in the spine, where it causes spinal disease, distorted spine, &c. ; in the bones of the knee, causing white swelling ; in the hip, causing hip disease ; in other joints, or the muscles, causing rheumatism ; in the glands about the neck or the skin, causing scrofula ; in the lungs, causing consumption, &c, &c. I might go on enumera- ting a long list of maladies springing from this corrupt source. We may, as a general rule, have health if we please. Is not this clearly true ? It is only necessary that we conform to certain laws which govern the great processes of life I have described. If we take proper food and drink, and only such, at proper hours, in proper quantities; if we take proper exercise and proper rest; if we keep the skin clean, and pure, and lively, the bowels free, and, most important of all, the lungs full and the chest large, while we always breathe a pure air, we cannot well be sick. Nature will always do her work well, if we do ours. We may, indeed, be injured by violence, and we may receive malarial and other poisons from the air. But, usually, if we have that robustness of health which obedience to the laws of health will give us, we can successfully resist and overcome these violences and poisons. [For a further explanation of this subject, see my Six Lectures.]