Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Organon of homoeopathic medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![g&neral imitation of the salutary effects of nature, abandoned to her own resources, thus introduced into the practice of medicine those derivative systems of merely hypothetical utility, and which every one varied according to the fancied indications suggested by his own ideas; others, aimiug at a still higher object, under- took designedly to promote the efforts which the vital powers exhibit in diseases^ to relieve the/mselves hy evacitations and oj)])osing metastases^ and endeavored in some degree to aid them^ by increasing still more these derivations and evacuations, imagining that, by this mode of treatment, they might justly arro- gate to themselves the names, rninistri naturce. Because it often happens, in chronic diseases, that the evacuations which nature excites, bring relief in cases where there are acute pains, paraly- sis, spasms, &c., the old school imagined that the true method of curing disease was by favoring, keeping up, or even increasing the evacuations. But they never discovered that all those pretended crises, those evacuations and derivations produced by nature abandoned to her own exertions, only procure palliative relief for a short period, and that, far from contributing towards a real cure, they, on the contrary, aggravate the internal primitive evil by consumino; the streno;th and the fluids. No one has ever seen those efforts of simple nature effect the durable recovery of a patient, nor have those evacuations, excited by the system,^ ever cured a chronic disease. On the contrary, in all cases of this nature, after a short relief (the duration of which gradually diminishes), the primitive affection is manifestly aggravated, and the attacks return stronger and more frequent than before, although the evacuations do not cease. In the same manner, nature, abandoned to her own resources in internal chronic diseases which threaten life, can only bring relief by exciting the appearance of external local symptoms, in order to turn away danger from the organs indispensable to exis- tence, and transport it, by metastasis, to those which are not so; such attempts, of an unintelligent, inconsiderate, but energetic vital force, have a tendency towards anything but a real cure; they are nothing more than palliatives, short stagnations imposed on the internal disease at the sacrifice of a great portion of the liquids and strength, without diminishing the primary disease in the * Equally inefficacioui are those produced artificially.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21056213_0055.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
