atients that the aim of reasonable people should be to
keep themselves in health rather than to be always straying, as it
were, upon the confines of disease and seeking assistance from drugs in
order to return to conditions from which they should never have
suffered themselves to depart. The various alkaline salts and
solutions, for example, the advertisements of which meet us at every
turn, and which are offered to the public as specifics, safely to be
taken, without anything so superfluous as the advice of medical men,
for all the various evils which are described by the advertisers as
gout or as heartburn, or as the consequences of 'uric acid,' do
unquestionably, in a certain proportion of cases, afford temporary
relief from some discomfort or inconvenience. They do this
notwithstanding persistence in the habit or in the indulgence, whatever
it may be, the over-eating, the want of exercise, the excessive
consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the
whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the
very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the
continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue
and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the
duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The
natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is
subservient to the digestive functions. It cannot be superseded by
artificial alkalinity without serious disturbance of nutrition; and the
aim of treatment, in the case of all digestive derangements, should be
to cure them by changing the conditions under which they arise, not to
palliate them for a time by the neutralisation of acid, which may,
indeed, give relief from present trouble, but which leaves unaltered
the conditions upon which the trouble really depends. Those who look
down the obituary lists of the newspapers will be struck by the fact
that large numbers of people, in prosperous circumstances, die as
sexagenarians from maladies to which various names are given but which
are, as a rule, evidences of degeneration and of premature senility,
while many who pass this period go on to enter upon an eighth or ninth
decade of life. The former class, we have no doubt, comprise those who
have lived without restraint of their appetites, and who have sought to
allay some of the consequences thence arising by self-medication, while
the latter class co