have grown-ups. Most colds are infectious,
like the fevers, and like them run their course, after which the cough
will subside along with the rest of the symptoms. But simply stopping
the cough won't hasten the recovery. Most popular "Cough-Cures" benumb
the upper throat and stop the tickling; smother the symptoms without
touching the cause. Many contain opium and thus load the system with two
poisons instead of one.

Lastly, in the realm of the nervous system, take that commonest of all
ills that afflict humanity--headache. Surely, this is not a curative
symptom or a blessing in disguise, or, if so, it is exceedingly well
disguised. And yet it unquestionably has a preventive purpose and
meaning. Pain, wherever found, is nature's abrupt command, "Halt!" her
imperative order to stop. When you have obeyed that command, you have
taken the most important single step towards the cure. _A headache
always means something_--overwork, under-ventilation, eye-strain,
underfeeding, infection. Some error is being committed, some bad
physical habit is being dropped into. There are a dozen different
remedies that will stop the pain, from opium and chloroform down to the
coal-tar remedies (phenacetin, acetanilid, etc.) and the bromides. But
not one of them "cures," in the sense of doing anything toward removing
the cause. In fact, on the contrary they make the situation worse by
enabling the sufferer to keep right on repeating the bad habit, deprived
of nature's warning of the harm that he is doing to himself. As the
penalties of this continued law-breaking pile up, he requires larger and
larger doses of the deadening drug, until finally he collapses, poisoned
either by his own fatigue-products or by the drugs which he has been
taking to deaden him against their effect.

In fine, follow nature's hints whenever she gives them: treat pain by
rest, infections by fresh air and cleanliness, the digestive
disturbances by avoiding their cause and helping the food-tube to flush
itself clean; keep the skin clean, the muscles hard, and the stomach
well filled--and you will avoid nine-tenths of the evils which threaten
the race.

The essence of disease consists, not in either the kind or the degree of
the process concerned, but only in its relations to the general balance
of activities of the organism, to its "resulting in discomfort,
inefficiency, or danger," as one of our best-known definitions has it.
Disease, then, is not absolute, but pur