ary ones. It is not enough for the body to be able to take
care of itself, and preserve a fair degree of efficiency in health,
under what might be termed favorable or average circumstances, but it
must also be prepared to protect itself and regain its balance in
disease.

The human automobile in its million-year endurance-run has had to learn
to become self-repairing; and well has it learned its lesson. Not only,
in the language of the old saw, is there "a remedy for every evil under
the sun," but in at least eight cases out of ten that remedy will be
found within the body itself. Generations ago this self-balancing,
self-repairing power was recognized by the more thoughtful fathers in
medicine and even dignified by a name in their pompous Latinity--the
_vis medicatrix naturae_, the healing power of nature.

In the new conception of disease, our drugs, our tonics, our
prescriptions and treatments, are simply means of rousing this force
into activity, assisting its operations, or removing obstacles in its
way. This remedial power does not imply any gift of prophecy on nature's
part, nor is it proof of design, or beneficent intention. It is rather
one of those blind reactions to certain stimuli, tending to restore the
balance of the organism, much as that interesting, new scientific toy,
the gyroscope car, will respond to pressure exerted or weight placed
upon one side by rising on that side, instead of tipping over. Let the
onslaught of disease be sufficiently violent and unexpected, and nature
will fail to respond in any way.

Moreover, we and our intelligences are a product of nature and a part
of her remedial powers. So there is nothing in the slightest degree
irrational or inconsistent in our attempting to assist in the process.

However, a great, broad, consoling and fundamental fact remains: that in
a vast majority of diseases which attack humanity, under ninety per cent
of the unfavorable influences which affect us, nature will effect a cure
if not too much interfered with. As the old proverb has it, "A man at
forty is either a fool or a physician"; and nature is a good deal over
forty and has never been accused of lacking intelligence.

In the first place, nature must have acquired a fair knowledge of
practical medicine, or at least a good working basis for it, from the
fact that the body, in the natural processes of growth and activity, is
perpetually manufacturing poisons for its own tissues.

In this age