Dr Jaeger's essays on health-culture / Gustav Jaeger ; translated and edited by Lewis R.S. Tomalin.

  • Gustav Jäger
Date:
1887
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr Jaeger's essays on health-culture / Gustav Jaeger ; translated and edited by Lewis R.S. Tomalin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the germ has wholly disappeared from his body, but this usually takes several years. \b) In the foregoing is shown the change which takes place in the fluid which nourishes the germ, and the second point is the change in the disease-germ itself. Just as poisonous ])lants lose their poisonous quality when grown in soil impregnated with human matter, the disease-germ, when it has multiplied, or, as it were, grown up, in the human organism, becomes “ humanised,” and loses its capacity of infecting. This, and nothing else,' is the weakening of fer- ments practised by Pasteur. To sum up, susceptibility to infection, i.e., to fermenta- tion, ceases, firstly, because the stored-up self-poison is ejected, and, secondly, because the body is impregnated with the self-poison of the disease-germ; and the disease- germ loses its capacity to infect when impregnated, t.e., “ humanised ” with human odour. Thus it can be under- stood how an infectious disease may find a natural cure without any further assistance than the sojourn of the patient in the fresh air, and how it is that .every epidemic dies away. XL—THE CONDUCTIVE METHODS OF CURE. The fact that the most varied kinds of diseases simply heal of themselves, under the single condition that no hindrance be opposed to the attenuating process of the disease-matter, has given rise to a School of Medicine which names its method the “ expectant,” he., waiting for the issue, or leaving the disease to work its own cure. This method is under all circumstances to be preferred to that which seeks to effect a cure with concentrated poison-