The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College.

  • Anderson, J. Wallace (James Wallace)
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    are and must be limits to Nature's salutary action. Are we to expect that she will successfully contend with two concurrmg evils so contrary in their character that the remedy for the one is of necessity the aggravation of the other? The arterio- capillary fibrosis that calls forth the compensatory hypertrophy of the heart, by so doing increases the blood pressure and aggravates the danger depending on the weakened state of the vessels. Nature cannot respond to these two opposite demands, and she complies with the one that was first made. Considera- tions such as these throw light, we think, on many of Nature's failures. If we understand that in these very failures she is but acting in accordance with that wider law to which we have just referred, we shall see that she is consistent in it all, that she is still true to herself It is in this law of nature that we find the key to the practice of our art. Nature works on principles that are broader, vastly broader, than we can apprehend ; art finds its application in the individual need. To correct the unit of error, to conform the exception to the rule is the province of our art. Nature proceeds on lines that run deep and are permanent; art meets the obvious necessity of the moment, a necessity that she herself has possibly created. It has been said, for example. What does Nature do for the child suffering from resistant gums when one or two free incisions would do away with all the pain and jeopardy? Nothing, if that will satisfy the pessimist. In the case of this particular child we have the unit of exaggeration of Nature's general law that there shall be a certain degree of discomfort set up by the growing teeth, which shall in turn lead the child to practise on its little fists or any other pike de resistance it can find in anticipation of the more substantial joints of later life. But the exception when positive pain is suffered, will occur from time to time, arising very probably out of conditions that have been elaborated from a more artificial existence, although the abeyance into which this practice of lancing the gums has lately fallen is calculated to draw a smile over the face of Nature herself as she reflects on the ephemeral existence of her critics' own methods. And so it is that while Nature is true to herself she is not false to us. She has left us the need of individual effort. We must know how Nature does her work that we may know how to help her. We must know how much she can do and how
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